Below you'll find links to all the information about InDesign that’s available on the Book Design Made Simple website, 
What exactly is an InDesign book template? It’s a blank InDesign document that has all the background work done for you. When you open a template, you’ll see an untitled document that’s already set up with InDesign preferences, trim size, margins, and styles.
Our InDesign book template is a companion to Book Design Made Simple, the only book that guides you through every step of designing your own book using Adobe InDesign. We believe that anyone can learn to craft a well designed book, and now we’ve created an InDesign book template to get you started more quickly. [Read more…]
InDesign’s live index includes some great advanced features: you can add italics to the index, add bold page numbers for illustrations, and even create a live index across several documents using InDesign’s Book feature.
It’s easy to create a live index for your book in InDesign, and there’s a major benefit to doing so: If you move any of your text, the index markers stay with the text and the index automatically updates!
Back when Fiona started Book Design Made Simple, she decided that writing in InDesign would be easiest. (After all, it was her native habitat.) And now one of our readers has admitted to doing the same. So we thought we’d explore the various reasons why anyone would want to write in a layout program. For us it worked perfectly. How about you? 
Book typesetting and layout tips are usually about the small stuff—fixing awkward hyphenation, using special characters for symbols, and so on—but most of the questions we get are about the BIG issues. How can I balance the number of text lines on facing pages? What if the last page of my chapter only has two lines? If my chapter has to end on a right-hand page, can I leave it blank? These issues arise all the time during book typesetting. We’ll explain the best ways to resolve them. 
Combining serif and sans serif fonts successfully can be a challenge, but it’s much easier once you know a few simple rules. It’s worth learning, as combining two fonts can really make your book design look professional. So don’t be daunted by the thousands of fonts available! The font-combining basics explained here will help to get you going quickly and easily. 
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. 
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? 
What the heck is a text variable, anyway? It’s copy that you can add anywhere in your document—but it varies depending on the context. For instance, you could set up your document to automatically insert the current date in a header. Or if you need to send readers to the last page, a text variable will automatically update the page number reference if you add or delete pages later.
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 
