Washington, D.C. InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

September 20, 2006

Wow!! A record-breaking attendance of more than 200 people enjoyed dynamic presentations by two of the best — James Alexander and Noha Edell.

We started the evening the usual way by devouring 25 large pizzas (another record) from the Manhattan Deli, next door; 20 dozen jumbo cookies from Costco; and gallons of water and soft drinks. The hour preceding the “formal” meeting gave attendees plenty of time to renew old friendships after the summer hiatus.

James Alexander led off the meeting with a dynamic, live presentation of Adobe Stock Photos®. We saw how easy it was to search for and retrieve images from more than 20 providers of stock photography. We learned how simple it was for designers to do this right from within InDesign® and get comp images for free to try out and then present to clients. After decisions have been made as to which images will be used, only a couple of clicks and you’ve acquired the high-res image. And this was no canned show. James did it online without a net, even when it came to collaborating with a “client” in Philadelphia!

He also showed how all the metadata, such as keywords, and the agreement under which you acquired the image are stored for ready retrieval. If you have any type of a digital asset management system, this info can be imported directly into it. Another neat feature is that Adobe Stock Photos keeps a record of each image, acquired so that if you lose your image or can't remember where you stored it, or your computer crashes before your regular back-up and it's lost (you do back up regularly, right?), you can log into your ASP account and download it again at no cost.

Here’s what some people had to say about James’ presentation:

“James’ presentation was very interesting. I haven’t used Adobe Stock Photos before, but will now.”

“James Alexander—excellent! Adobe should put a video of him on the web explaining [Adobe] Bridge®.”

“James’ presentation was more useful than I had expected — I’m looking forward to upgrading to CS2 so I can use Adobe Stock Photos.”

Noha Edell followed James with a combination demonstration of the just announced Acrobat® 8.0 that morphed into a demonstration of how to create PDFs from InDesign that maintain interactivity with web links, mouse-over transitions, and video. Noha gave a gutsy presentation of the prerelease version of Acrobat 8.0 on a Windows platform. I say “gutsy” because, as we all saw, there are still a few “quirks” to be resolved. Several people commented on the use by Noha and James of Windows laptops. Attendees may not have heard that currently the Windows version of Acrobat 8.0 is in the best condition.

Judging by the reaction of the crowd, the two most popular features of Acrobat 8.0 seemed to be the collaboration features. The “wows” really came up when Noha showed the greatly increased automation in intelligent forms creation, where Acrobat make a good guess at what types of fields you have and how you want them filled in. Editing those choices is certainly much faster than doing each by hand.

Comments about Noha were the usual laudatory stuff:

“As always, Noha was superb. I was even inspired to buy Acrobat, which I have so far resisted.”

“Acrobat 8 — VERY impressive.”

“And Noha — excellent, as usual.”

“Noha: funny & outstanding & easy to follow.”

Overall comments about the meeting included almost universal approval of the venue and the refreshments.

Ken Chaletzky
Copy General Corp.
Washington, D.C. Chapter Representative

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