If you’re importing a Word index into InDesign, chances are good that the index will import just fine. But what if you get the dreaded “index entries contain invalid characters” error? This happened to one of our readers recently. It’s a tricky issue to resolve since InDesign doesn’t specify which characters are invalid. With a Word index containing hundreds (or thousands!) of entries, how can you find the specific characters causing the issue? [Read more…]
InDesign Book feature: the good, the bad, and the ugly
The InDesign Book feature provides a great way to combine smaller InDesign files into one larger Book file. It’s easy to use, and you’ll find our step-by-step guide to using the Book feature here. But, after using the InDesign Book feature for Book Design Made Simple and numerous other book projects, we’ve discovered that it’s not perfect—so forewarned is forearmed! [Read more…]
Book arts: handmade books
The term book arts encompasses an endless variety of books, usually handmade or produced in a limited edition. Included are all kinds of artists’ books, ezines, graphic novels, printed ephemera, and “other experimental forms of publication.” (Doesn’t that sound interesting?)
Search for “art book fair” and you’ll find that book arts are alive and well around the world. Here in Vancouver, Canada, our Vancouver Art Book Fair 2018 will be held from October 18 to 21 at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. This prompted me to share with you some of the books I’ve created as a book artist rather than as a book designer.
Working with a book illustrator
Will you work with a book illustrator for your book cover and/or pages? If so, you probably have lots of questions! Where can you find a suitable book illustrator? How much should you expect one or more illustrations to cost? Will you own the copyright of the illustrations used in your book? What size, resolution, and format should the digital files be?
Here are answers to all those questions and more. [Read more…]
Calculate book page count using word count
Wondering how many Word pages equal a book page? You can easily calculate book page count using the word count from your Word document. We’ll explain two easy methods to calculate book page count: 1) use one of our simple formulas as a book page count calculator, or 2) use our InDesign template to experiment with book trim size and type size to accurately determine a page count for books. Use whichever method is easiest for you. [Read more…]
Reference books for book designers
Ask any book designer about their collection of reference books and you’ll get a long list of the usual suspects: books about design, typography, layout, and grids; dictionaries and style guides; software manuals; and lots of books and magazines kept for inspiration. But which books are indispensable to a book designer?
InDesign endnotes go live in CC2018
Adobe’s 2018 update for InDesign includes a great new feature for book designers—live InDesign endnotes. Until now, footnotes and endnotes could be imported from Word to InDesign, but only footnotes continued to be live and linked, allowing us to insert and delete them without messing up the numbering system. Now we have the same flexibility with endnotes! [Read more…]
Converting multiple images to CMYK in Photoshop
Need to convert to CMYK in Photoshop? Let’s say you’re designing and typesetting a book with lots of images. You’ve finished laying out all the pages, and your last task is to prepare the images for print. All of your images have either been scanned or photographed, and therefore they are all RGB color (not CMYK color, as required by most offset printers). And most images are JPGs, although you might have a few PNGs too.
It’s a monumental task to convert each image to CMYK individually. Suppose you have 50+ images, or even 1,500+ images! I found myself in this situation recently, and am sharing with you a quick and easy way to convert all of your images to CMYK at once by batch processing actions in Photoshop. (It sounds complicated, but isn’t.) [Read more…]
Designing a book series
Are you designing a book cover that’ll become part of a series or boxed set? If so, you’ll need to think ahead! There are a few design considerations to take into account when you plan your book cover design. Not only should your cover design be successful using different title lengths and images, but more importantly, it must create a look or brand that’ll easily identify all future books as being part of the same series. Sound challenging? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! [Read more…]
Adding images and numbers to tables in InDesign
There are lots of features you can add to your tables in InDesign to make them more appealing and easier to follow for your readers. Three of the most useful features are explained below: (1) creating two header rows that repeat at the top of every page of a multi-page table; (2) adding images to your table; and (3) aligning columns of numbers.
We’ll use the basic table from our first blog post about tables as a starting point to explain step-by-step how you can set up all of these features in your table. [Read more…]
