The Adobe InDesign CS4 Conversion Guide is now available. It includes chapters on the “Top 10 Differences You Need to Understand,” the “Top 25 Shortcuts You Should Know,” and more handy reference material.
For additional QuarkXPress resources, see the Help topic on opening QuarkXPress documents in InDesign.
For those of you who aren’t aware of Kuler, go into InDesign, choose Window > Extensions > Kuler, and start playing around. Kuler is a set of colors and themes designed by an online community. You can view videos here and here, and you can read about Kuler in an InDesign Help topic.
For those of you who’ve already played around with Kuler, you may want to check out the new Community Pulse feature. Community Pulse is a data visualization that displays colors of downloaded Kuler themes on a color wheel. Users can explore the relative popularity of colors by different countries, time periods, and tags.
This screenshot shows the popularity of colors downloaded in the USA (l) and Brazil (r) in Spring 2008. The larger circles and bars indicate more popular colors (i.e., themes with those colors were downloaded more often).
There is a lot of data packed into the feature. To get started:
- Sign in with your Adobe ID to change the menu options
- Mouse over the histogram to see colors by hue on the color wheel
- Try the granularity slider to see more or less color detail
- Select the comparison icon (two circles) to compare/contrast views
You can read more about Community Pulse here.
One of the nice things about having Help on the Web is that I can update the Help files between releases. If someone points out an error or omission, I can edit the source files, and a couple weeks later, it’s as though the files were never wrong.
I can also add new topics. As I’ve been analyzing search data and survey comments, I realized I missed a few things.
A Complete List of Videos
Even though I had already blogged about videos, several people requested a list of videos organized by topic. Your wish is my command. I created a new Help topic that organizes videos by subject.
The Navigator panel
When I heard that the program team was removing the Navigator panel, I made the mistake of deleting the old topic rather than leaving it in and explaining what happened to the feature. “Navigator” ended up being the #4 search term in November. Ouch. So I added a new topic cleverly entitled, “About the Navigator panel.” I explain that it’s been replaced by Power Zoom.
Contact Sheets
“Contact sheets” was a top 10 search entry, but there’s nothing in Help on the Web that tells people how to create contact sheets. Fortunately, a few bloggers and authors have written about using Adobe products to create contact sheets, so if people did a search, they were most likely able to find something to help them out. Still, if people search only within Help, I don’t want them to draw the dreaded “No results found” message. So I created a topic called “Creating contact sheets.”
Foreign Affairs
Every now and then, someone asks how to edit Japanese or Arabic text in InDesign. Even though I create an entirely different Help system for Asian versions of InDesign, I realized I never pointed this out to English customers in Help. So I wrote a new topic called “Working with additional languages.”
If you notice any errors in these new topics, or if you’re aware of any other gaps or mistakes in InDesign Help, please let me know. Just leave a comment.
