Minneapolis InDesign User GroupMeeting Summary
Twin Cities InDesign User Group meeting
Tue, Feb 26th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Minneapolis College of Art & Design
Event Details
Our February meeting of the Twin Cities InDesign User Group took place, again, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. A full hearty group of 136 people turned out to learn more about wranglin’ text.
We started with a call out to anyone who has tips they can share, to think about preparing a demonstration to present at future meetings.
Also we are looking for someone who can help out the group with our small print needs, someone who has access to print up our tip sheets, surveys, and signage we use at these meetings. If you can help out, please contact Keith.
Our first speaker was Maria Rogers, a local curriculum developer and trainer for the graphics industry. She started out showing us all the features we pass by in the Find/Change Dialog Box and why we should get to know them and how we can save time and reduce errors by understanding and using the depth of adjustments we can make within the Find/Change palette.
As a reference to further understand the “GREP” set of actions, Maria shared that www.indesignsecrets.com has a wealth of information on the subject and is always a good resource. With a good mix of humor and understanding, Maria also showed us many quick shortcuts available for various bulleting and numbering styles.
Our next speaker was Brian Arnell, a production artist from Tadware & Co., who with tongue in cheek told us all about the good old days of setting text before PostScript. Brian followed up by showing us many of the ways he navigates around his documents with keyboard shortcuts that take him jumping from paragraph to paragraph or from the subheading on page 1 to body copy on page 3. And for those of us who don’t use laptops, we found out some of the ways a desktop keyboard differs from a laptop. Brian has a great fundamental skill of navigating text, built on working with the keyboard shortcuts.
Brian showed us where, under Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, we can access the hundreds of commands available to tailor our workflow. To give us a quick reference guide to some of the most used shortcuts, Keith Gilbert from Gilbert Consulting has made a 2-page PDF available to us at http://gilbertconsulting.com/resources-misc.html.
Then Keith took the podium to show us how to properly manage spelling and the tools in the dictionary that are the basis for our managing of correct spelling, proper hyphenation, and appropriate use of capitalization.
Using a mind-numbing multi-page catalog as an example, Keith showed us how to take care of the overwhelming sea of red squiggly underlines that appear when dynamic spelling is turned on with just the out-of-the-box standard settings.
Everyone took away a few good ideas for better managing those pesky typos and misspellings. Now if we can just get our fonts to behave...
To close out the evening Ed Klemz from Central Coast helped to award the pile of almost 30 door prizes. These give-always ranged from great InDesign reference guides and books to a hat or a shirt or an iPod. Or even a full copy of InDesign CS3! Thank YouThanks again go to our sponsors who help keep our meetings free: Central Coast Solutions and MCAD. And thanks to Keith, Maria, Brian, and the others who give of their time and knowledge for us. Comments from the evaluation sheets"Very informational, helpful and funny. I enjoyed all the presenters and learned some good tips. Keep 'em comin'."
"Entertaining speakers with useful information."
"Nice to see real-life, useful tools! I will use this stuff tomorrow."
"Very useful, smart techniques...want more!"
"As always, I learned some stuff I should have known...a good dozen tricks tonight!"
"This was great stuff!"
"Very useful! I will definitely put some of these techniques to work! I can't wait 'til I get CS3!"
"Terrific presentations...Informative and entertaining."
(notes prepared by Patrick Gadbois)
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