Archive for December, 2010

Ask a Pro Session – Digital Publishing with InDesign

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Bob Bringhurst | Comments (4)

Update: This session has already taken place. Click here to view the recording.

Ask a CS Pro: Producing publications with Digital Publishing Suite

Friday, December 17 · 12:00pm – 1:00pm Pacific Standard Time

If you’ve never attended an Ask a Pro session, you’re missing out on free training. Here’s how it works. At a certain time (Friday at noon, West Coast time), you log in to a Connect session (http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/askcspro). You can log in a few minutes early to make sure everything works. Then watch and listen.

Here’s the event description:

“Learn how to use the tools and viewer technology of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to produce publications for the iPad and other tablet devices. Join Chris Converse from Codify Design Studio to learn how to use the designer-friendly Digital Publishing Suite tools now available on Adobe Labs to create compelling content that combine the richness of print design with the interactivity of digital.”

Click this link to learn more.

Hot Spot Button Workaround for InDesign Dig Pubs

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Bob Bringhurst | Comments (45)

The interactivity features in InDesign were originally designed to work with SWF and PDF formats. When using DPS tools, some of these interactivity features are fully supported, some are partially supported, and some are not supported at all. The Buttons feature is partially supported in DPS. One limitation makes it difficult to create button hot spots: the Show/Hide Buttons action is not supported.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround. The key is to create a multi-state object (MSO) that includes both the hot spot image on the base state and the “close button” image on the target state, but no object in the MSO can be interactive. Once you create the MSO, you place invisible interactive buttons on top of the MSO These buttons switch states. Here’s a quick video of the button effect shown in the Desktop Viewer:

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Sharing Text Between Two InDesign Documents

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Bob Bringhurst | Comments (15)

If you need to use the same text in two InDesign documents, it can be a hassle to keep the changes consistent. If you find a typo or need to add a paragraph, you have to make the change in two different places. To simplify editing, you can use the InCopy export options–and you don’t need to have InCopy to get this to work.

Being able to share text between two documents is especially important when you’re publishing to mobile devices. If you’re using the Digital Publishing Suite to create magazines for the iPad, you can create separate horizontal and vertical documents so that a different layout of the same content appears when the iPad is rotated.

Quick Summary: Export a linked InCopy (.icml) file from one file, and place it in the other file. When you want to edit the linked text, check out the linked story in one document, save the changes, check it in, and then update the other document.

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