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Tuesday, February 7, 2006

This meeting was one of the best attended we’ve had. More than 130 people showed up to enjoy food, drink, and camaraderie — and, oh yeah, to learn something more about InDesign®.

We started by polishing off 20 large pizzas and dozens of cans and bottles of soda and water. All the while, people were meeting up with old friends and looking over the fascinating displays in the U.S. Navy Memorial Museum.

Around 7:00 pm we moved into the auditorium, where Mike Witherell, local InDesign trainer and expert, reviewed one of the most basic, but most used, features of InDesign — importing Word documents.

With InDesign CS, one could import files and utilize the Word paragraph and character styles. As long as the names matched, the Word files would take on the attributes of the IDCS styles. New to IDCS2 is the ability to map style names. This way one can tell ID that, when it sees a particular style, it should map it to another. Of course, this works well only when the document originator uses styles.

Mike also pointed out that it was often best to “clean up” your Word files before importing them. He also showed how to change “faked” italic and bold into real fonts prior to importing. And he reviewed the importance of setting up global defaults in ID by making your changes when no ID files are open. Mike showed us how to use scripts provided with ID and others available on the Adobe site to clean up your Word files in a more automated fashion.

Later he moved on to showing how to use “anchored object,s” which will keep graphics and sidebar text/heads aligned with the text they belong with. Mike showed how ID recognizes left- and right-hand pages and jumps the graphics accordingly. Neat!

Mike closed by spending some time showing how one can export ID files back to Word and how to import and use Excel spreadsheets as ID tables.

Caleb Clauset, now with Typéfi, gave us an update on this complete publishing system. Typéfi allows magazine, journal, and book publishers — anyone who is involved along with others in content creation and document design — to work together seamlessly and in an automated fashion. Writers and editors maintain control over the text, while the ID designer controls the appearance. Any authorized user can make changes to the text and request a preview PDF of the document as it will look when run through the InDesign composition engine. More information can be found on their website.

The meeting closed with our highly anticipated prize drawings, dring which copies of InDesign CS2 and Acrobat® Professional are awarded along with books and T-shirts.

Thanks to user group members Marie Guidry for taking the meeting notes, which were the basis of this report, and to Jeff Long for taking the photos.

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