InDesign CS3 Productivity Tour

Today I spent the day in Rosemont, IL at an Adobe InDesign CS3 Productivity Tour seminar given by Terry White and Kelby Training. It was a day well spent learning about some of the things that I didn't already know about InDesign. One of the more refreshing parts of the day was the affirmation that I do know quite a bit about InDesign already.

My top five takeaways for the day are:

1. Nested Styles - InDesign allows you to create several types of styles for things like characters, paragraphs, tables, and objects. Within any of these style categories you can created "Nested Styles". A nested style can be used to switch styles within a single sentence or paragraph. For example, if you want to create an interview layout like this...
   
   Maxim: Where did you go to school?
   Chad: University of Illinois
   
   You can create a style that is called interview question that specifies that the font should be bold and dark orange through a colon. After the colon it can switch to no style, or the applied paragraph style. You can do the same for interview answers using a different color to distinguish the interviewee from the interviewer.
2. Interactive PDFs - Within Adobe InDesign you can create interactive buttons or tabs with rollover effects and actions. You can also embed Quicktime movies with interactive controls. So how do these movies look in print? Great! Why? Because you actually display a high resolution graphic in place of the video for print rendering. You hide the controls.
3. Common Typo Replacement - Within the preferences for spelling you can specify words that you commonly misspell and substitute the correct spelling for them. For example, I commonly misspell the word Tuthill (where I work) as Tuhill as I try to type it extra fast. I can map the correct spelling of the word with my common misspelling it and InDesign will instantly replace my misspelling with the correct one. Another use for it is to allow you to save certain shortcuts in the preferences. For example, I find myself needing to type my job title of Director, Application Development far too often. I can setup an auto-fix phrase such as DAD, which will automatically replace my shortcut with the full phrase.
4. OpenType Fonts - These types of fonts are capable of storing 64,000 glyphs, or characters. TrueType fonts and other older font formats were only capable of storing 256 glyphs. This means that font creators can store several variations of a single letter instead of one uppercase letter and one lowercase letter. For example, they can store as many versions of the letter F as they want. Same font, different style. Other great things within OpenType fonts are that they can handle character combinations that are commonly found such as gh or ea, etc and have multiple combinations for those as well. The value in this is that creative types have more freedom to make unique variations of a single word or phrase. Fractions and ordinals are two other things that OpenType fonts help to format in very readable formats without any superscripts, subscripts, and kerning.
5. Create Swatches - This may seem very fundamental to anyone who's worked with InDesign and printers at all, but you need to create a swatch for every color that you use within text and graphics within the document. The primary reason that this is so important is so the printers can get an exact print match to the colors that you've given them in your electronic document.

There were several other great tips that I left the convention center with today including linking text, creating frames in many shapes using standard and custom paths, dynamic spelling correction, table formatting, cleaning up text, text and graphic placement using Adobe Bridge, and a whole bunch more to demonstrate just how powerful InDesign really is.

For additional information on InDesign the following URLs may come in handy:

• Terry White's Video Podcast Collection
  
• Adobe InDesign User Group Website