Tag Archives: InDesign

What’s your niche? It determines your strategy

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Niche writers to limited markets Here we begin to see the modern reality of publishing. The change is of the same type as we saw with the conversion in television from three, then four, gargantuan mass-market networks to the current reality of thousands of channels on cable and satellite. The same thing has happened in magazines where there are now over 10,000 magazines in the US alone. There are now millions of active blogs. We are currently … Continue reading →

The 3 dashes: hyphen, en dash, and em dash

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5. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes The next major change we need to discuss is dashes. Typewriters only have one—the hyphen. Type has three—the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. All three have very specific usage rules. Hyphen: This is the character used to hyphenate words at the end of a line and to create compound words. For example, 10-point is the normal point size for book publishers’ body copy. In fact, hyphens are … Continue reading →

Exporting KF8 (a Kindle Fire book) from your book in InDesign

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Producing a KF8 Kindle book Until very recently, I gave some very explicit instructions for the construction of the HTML and CSS needed to step back in time to Amazon’s MOBI format. It was extremely limited in what was allowed. Designers are rarely good coders, and writers even less so. InDesign is the best tool we have at present, but there’s still a long way to go until some of the typographic niceties we rely on in print … Continue reading →

Control your spacing & alignments with tabs & fixed spaces

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Tabs and fixed spaces Spaces cause many other problems for people trained in typewriting. On a typewriter, the spacebar is a known quantity. This is because every character in monospaced type is the same width—even the space. This is definitely not true for type. In fact, in type, the space band is often a different size than it was the last time you hit the key. This is caused by several factors. First, the word space character … Continue reading →

Writing in InDesign is the only sensible choice for writers in the new paradigm of on-demand self-publishing

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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…

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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

Skilled Workman Posted on by

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 →

Typography: Type has nothing to do with typing

Skilled Workman Posted on by

It is obvious that even the terminology is different. However, we have hardly begun. Much more significant than the new language are the actual mechanics of typesetting. The rules have changed! In fact, one of the difficulties in teaching publishing classes today involves a paradox. Writing classes are secretarial. Classes all teach writing using Word: but Word cannot produce professional typography or the formatting services required by the reader. Writing groups assume Word: if you give them … Continue reading →

The easy way to fix your default paragraph and character styles

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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 →

Getting set up to freely create your type

Skilled Workman Posted on by

One of the more daunting aspects of book design for the inexperienced is page layout. Most people have Word experience and as I have said countless times already—Word cannot do professional page layout. In fact, it is worse than that because Word’s feeble attempts give you bad habits and poor expectations—which must be corrected. I’m assuming that you have your preferences set up; and that you have designed a good, efficient workspace that fits your style of … Continue reading →