Link to the InDesign CS5.5 Help PDF
Anna-Marie gave us this link in Design Geek for the online help PDFs for CS5.5
Continue reading →Category Archives: On-Demand Publishing
Margins are more important than many think: Make the margins bigger
Make the margins bigger | I love typography, the typography and fonts blog. The I Love Typography blog is often over the top. Even as a typographer who has focused his career on type—both font design and page layout (the two parts of typography)— this blog is always fun, often beautiful, but commonly irrelevant to my daily work. On the other hand, the item discussed in the posting this morning is critical to excellence in typography. Margins … Continue reading →
Writing in InDesign is the only sensible choice for writers in the new paradigm of on-demand self-publishing
The greatly expanded and rewritten Writing In InDesign Second Edition has been released Buy it Now! Versions available so far Spiral-bound premium workbook $19.99 7×10 perfect-bound paperback $17.99 Kindle (with embedded fonts for Fire) $7.99 (Available in the Kindle Lending Library) What started as a relatively small update turned into a large scale revision when I began adapting my popular Writing In InDesign book to the responses and suggestions I received. I have been pleasantly surprised at all the people … Continue reading →
InDesign CS6 is all about promises for the future…
There are many exciting things to be found in the new version of InDesign. But if you read carefully, most of them are focused on an unspecified future where ePUB3 and HTML5 /CSS3 are the normal standards of ebook publishing. They are not now. In fact, there is no ePUB3 reader in common use at this time. In fact, there is really nothing out there for readers of ePUB books. I love CS6. It makes excellent ePUBs. … Continue reading →
Using styles enables global control of your book’s typography
Today I’m mentioning the basic structure of typography. There is one concept which enables typography as we know it in modern book publishing. This is the concept of styles. These styles are contained in styles panels. InDesign has five of them: paragraph, character, object, table, and cell. Styles are also available in word processors—even though they are not nearly so powerful there. What is a style? A style is a collection of specialized typographic defaults that can … Continue reading →
Font families, font widths, italics, and obliques
Font families Over the years, font design has developed groups of fonts that are obviously variants of the same basic font. They are called font families. These families can have differences in weight and width. Commonly, they have also have italic variants; but that is really a special case, as we will see in a bit. Font weight Weight is the thickness of the stroke. Here are the common weights arranged in order from thin to thick: … Continue reading →
Get a grip about Amazon! They’ll sell your books.
Writer Folks – Time to “Man-up” about Amazon. You don’t matter that much. « Andy Holloman – Novel – “Shades of Gray”. Andy has nailed it here. Amazon is too large to personally deal with each one of us. We need to be thankful that they’ll let us in—at all. Lulu is just as bad for the same reasons. The point is: You do not have to use them!
Continue reading →The easy way to fix your default paragraph and character styles
I received this question today from a friend: I made some mistakes when I set the original para styles and they have become some sort of default that has to be corrected for every new project. Do I have to delete the whole thing and start over again? I can do it, but I hope I can do it an easier way. Resetting your paragraph defaults is very easy. To do it globally (for InDesign as a whole), … Continue reading →
Typography for ministry: The reality of picking fonts
The basic parts of type Again, we need some more basic language definitions. Without it, I can not help you in your ministry. You can see above how the point size of the type relates to the ascender, cap height, x-height, baseline, and descender. More importantly, you get a glimpse of things that are important in the world of typography. This illustration is from an introduction to typography in publishing found in Appendices A & B in … Continue reading →
Self-publishers need excellent typography
Things have changed so much in book publishing, that you must understand the new paradigm and why this means you must understand typography. Self-published authors must learn the art of communication with type. This is an excerpt from Writing In InDesign 2nd Edition which will be released as soon as possible. Here’s a link to the 1st edition _________________________________________ Writing within InDesign Here I am again recommending a road less traveled by—not unusual in my life and work. … Continue reading →