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June 7, 2006

WOW!!  What a great turnout we had for our June 7^th meeting. 188 InDesign users and users-to-be met at the U.S. Navy Memorial auditorium that Wednesday evening for about three hours of refreshments, chatting with colleagues and learning from great speakers and volunteer member presentations.

We had our usual spread of fresh, hot pizzas from nearby Manhattan Deli.  We went through 25 large pizzas this time.  Plenty of Costco cookies were chomped on along with the quaffing of soft drinks and bottled water.  Tums were optional.

At 7:00pm, we filled the auditorium seats and began the more formal part of our meeting. Janet Frick from Training Resources LLC of Richmond, VA gave a fantastic presentation on how to create a book from scratch.  She reminded us that the best books begin with a plan. The she created a document, determined the format, made chapters and master pages. With the underlying structure in place, she placed text and graphics and then used InDesign’s features to automatically create a table of contents and an index. She was kind enough to provide a handout which is available as a PDF download from this site.

Long Document Planning in InDesign CS2
Provided by Training Resources

Download [PDF: 1.8 MB]  

Following Janet, Lee Anne George from the Association of Research Libraries showed us how she uses InDesign to create her long report documents that include text, tables and graphics. She got some laughs and sighs as she regaled the attendees with memories of gluing paper onto pages and using her copier as an enlarging/reducing camera. Many of us remember those days (and beyond).  Her real-world experiences were enjoyable.

After Lee Anne, Katie O’Brien from National Trade Productions demonstrated how she created an Exhibitor Prospectus using InDesign. Her use of images in text and transparencies resulted in an eye-catching brochure that really got the mood across. It was a complex looking piece that she made seem easy by utilizing the capabilities of InDesign.

We concluded the meeting with a prize drawing for lots of goodies including several books, plug-ins from Teacup Software and Markzware, and the grand prize of a copy of Adobe InDesign CS2. 

Teacup Software: www.teacupsoftware.com
Markzware: www.markzware.com/main_us/
Adobe Systems: www.adobe.com 

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

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