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…]
InDesign
Below you'll find links to all the information about InDesign that’s available on the Book Design Made Simple website, book, videos, and blog.
Get started with Part I of Book Design Made Simple, where you’ll learn how to lease and install Adobe InDesign, create a document, and import your manuscript from Word. Download Part I for free by subscribing to our blog—simply use the form below.
Excerpts from Book Design Made Simple
- Word vs InDesign: good reasons to switch
- Hyphenation and justification: make your text look fabulous
- Baseline grid: align your text and images consistently
- Stroke panel: creating lines, arrows, and more
- Layers: how to use them with text and shapes
- Object styles: how and why to use them
- Color gradients: tips for best results
Video tutorials
- New updates to CC2017
- Basics: navigating, selecting, and layers
- Layout and typesetting tricks
- Styles and organization
- Inserting images into shapes
- Drawing shapes and using color
- Effects: transparency, shadows, etc.
Blog posts
Below are all the blog posts in the InDesign category, starting with the most recent post.
Using InDesign keyboard shortcuts
You can save a lot of time using InDesign keyboard shortcuts. Many users find that they work faster on their keyboard than with their mouse or trackpad. Does that sound like you? Read on to learn how to use this very handy function for applying styles in InDesign. [Read more…]
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…]
InDesign footnotes: an alternate typesetting method
If your book has footnotes, you’re probably using automatic InDesign footnotes in your layout. And that’s great! But what if you compiled your footnotes in a separate Word document or didn’t use the automatic footnote feature in Word or InDesign?
Before Word and InDesign added their automatic footnote features, and well before Fiona and I met each other, we both invented a way—interestingly, the same way—to lay out InDesign footnotes manually for print books. In this blog post, I’ll explain the layout method that we both used—it still works perfectly.
It’s YouTube time!
My chair creaks. Start over. I sneeze. Start over. The phone rings. Move it out of the room and start over. “Ummm.” Start over. Someone comes in the room and rustles around. Start over. If I had a dog it would definitely be barking about now. Start over, start over, start over!
Such are the interruptions when I sit down to make a five-minute video about using InDesign. [Read more…]
Using the Book feature in InDesign
InDesign’s Book feature can be handy! Let’s say you’re working on a book with lots of images and/or chapters. And the file sizes are enormous. In fact, they are so big that you thought it would be smart to divide the book into separate documents for parts or chapters. That’s exactly what we did with Book Design Made Simple. It was more convenient for us to swap smaller sections back and forth than to send the entire book each time. All the parts or chapters were linked together at the end using InDesign’s Book feature. So this blog post explains how to create a Book file, or as we call it, “book” a book.
Adobe Creative Cloud 2017
In early November, we all woke up to find Adobe Creative Cloud waiting to be updated. What—again? Well, it turns out that this update, CC 2017, does provide some InDesign enhancements that might help you work more effectively and improve your design. We’ll discuss the significant ones here. [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…]
Making tables look good in InDesign
You’ve imported your table or spreadsheet from Word or Excel into InDesign, and made a few adjustments to the text and columns following our previous blog post, Want to import from Excel into InDesign? Your table probably looks okay (i.e. readable), but does it rock your world? Not so much.
There are lots of ways to make tables look good in InDesign. In this blog post, we’ll take you through the steps to create a simple yet attractive greyscale or color table. We’ll start by explaining InDesign’s cell and table styles, as they provide an easy way to make all the tables in your book consistent. [Read more…]
Want to import from Excel into InDesign?
Recently we’ve been asked how to import an Excel spreadsheet into InDesign. In Book Design Made Simple we walk you through importing tables from Word, but importing a spreadsheet from Excel is a bit different so we’ll walk you through it here. And, because spreadsheets and tables rarely import into InDesign looking like they did in Excel and Word, we’ll give you a few tips on the easiest way to get started. [Read more…]
