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Thursday, August 12, 2004

The Twin Cities InDesign® user group met for the first time at the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis. A cozy 80 people showed up to learn about InDesign’s OpenType® features and the future of our local user group. The group’s founders — Keith Gilbert, Charlie Townes, and a handful of local InDesign advocates — wanted to check the interest level for a local user group. If Thursday’s meeting is typical, Minneapolis appears to be a hotbed of interested InDesign users.

The group’s founders hope that the group will evolve into a forum in which local users exchange information, share tricks and tips, and present success stories and case studies.

Keith Gilbert kicked off the meeting with a presentation about OpenType fonts. See Keith’s handout for an outline of his presentation.

OpenType Fonts Download Keith Gilbert’s presentation outline. Download PDF file 497 Kb download

Following the presentation, a panel of experts — Keith Gilbert of Gilbert Consulting, Charlie Townes of Campbell Mithun, and Pete Rivard of the Dunwoody Institute — answered questions from the audience. Here is a summary of some of the topics discussed.

Q	Does InDesign support picas as a measuring system?
A	Yes. You can set the preferences to use picas or inches.
Q	An audience member convinced her entire art department [at a catalog company] to switch to InDesign. They found a plug-in that would create fractions, but now that she’s learned about OpenType fonts, does she still need the plug-in?
A	No. As long as the OpenType font has fractions built into it, you won’t need a plug-in to assist with fractions.
Q	Now that we’ve learned about the Glyph palette and the fact that you can choose textual alternatives, is there a way to hide this feature? I don’t want people telling me that I should be choosing the third “E” alternative.
A	No, you can’t hide the feature, but we can understand why you would want to.
Q	Will OpenType fonts embed in a PDF?
A	Yes, unless the vendor has turned off this feature.
Q	What is the benefit of using a font manager? Do you recommend one product over another?
A	First, the answer applies to Mac users only. We did not discuss font management for PC users. Font managers allow you to keep (and preview) fonts on your system without activating them. Suitcase and Font Reserve are two popular products. The panel recommends choosing a font manager that is a leading product because, if your operating system is upgraded, font managers can lag behind in upgrading their products to work on the new system. If you are using OS X, the panel recommends using Suitcase.
Q	I used a white logo (Illustrator® EPS) on a black background and it looked right in the file, but it didn’t output correctly. How can I fix this?
A	You can set up the Illustrator file to overprint, so when it comes into InDesign, it will function correctly. You can also use Overprint Preview in InDesign to make sure that you won’t have problems.

Once the Q&A session wrapped up, door prizes were awarded to some lucky attendees.

We hope to have meetings on a quarterly basis. Please contact the chapter representative if you have ideas for future presentations or discussion topics.

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