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You are here: Home / Archives for typesetting

Typesetting


Book typesetting sample photo.Below you'll find links to all the information about typesetting that’s available on our 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

  • Running heads — what to include in your novel or nonfiction book
  • Typeface vs font: what’s the difference?
  • Hyphenation and justification settings: make your text look fabulous
  • Baseline grid: aligns the text on all pages throughout your book
  • Unequal column widths: how to set up a page layout with unequal column widths

 

Video tutorials

  • Typesetting a poetry book
  • Centering poems in text
  • Using columns to change your layout

 

Blog posts

Below are all the blog posts in the Typesetting tag, starting with the most recent post.

Error importing Word index into InDesign

May 13, 2019 By Fiona Raven 2 Comments

Import Word index to InDesign errorIf 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…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: index, typesetting

Text variables in InDesign: why and how

January 7, 2019 By Glenna Collett 13 Comments

mysterious looking book symbolizing text variablesWhat 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.

Now think how useful text variables could be as navigational tools (i.e., running heads) in a nonfiction book. They can make the current chapter number and chapter title appear—presto!—on verso pages and the most recent internal heading appear on recto pages. And that’s exactly what I’m going to demonstrate in this article. Adobe’s official user guide instructions on the topic of text variables are a bit sketchy, so I’ve developed a detailed lesson for you. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: text frames, typesetting

Optical margin alignment

February 13, 2018 By Glenna Collett 8 Comments

quotation marks to indicate optical margin alignmentSome InDesign functions have names that you would never be able to guess, and that makes them really tough to discover and learn. One of these is Optical Margin Alignment (I’m calling it OMA), which is InDesign’s formal name for hanging punctuation. I used to see this effect in other people’s work and then try to imitate it, but I couldn’t because I had no idea what it was called. So this article explains what it is and how to do it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: typesetting

Reference books for book designers

December 4, 2017 By Fiona Raven 9 Comments

Reference books about book designAsk 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?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Cover Design Tagged With: color, typesetting

InDesign footnotes: an alternate typesetting method

October 8, 2017 By Glenna Collett 14 Comments

asterisks for InDesign footnotesIf 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.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: footnotes/endnotes, paragraph styles, text frames, typesetting

Adobe Creative Cloud 2017

December 12, 2016 By Glenna Collett 2 Comments

cube with CC2017 spelled outIn 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…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: footnotes/endnotes, InDesign updates, typesetting

Adding images and numbers to tables in InDesign

November 6, 2016 By Fiona Raven Leave a Comment

Table with imagesTried adding images 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…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: images, tables, typesetting

Want to import from Excel into InDesign?

August 9, 2016 By Fiona Raven 4 Comments

Sample table imported from Excel into InDesign.Have you tried importing from Excel 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…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: tables, text frames, typesetting

Typesetting math in InDesign

March 7, 2016 By Glenna Collett 6 Comments

collage of colorful math typesettingHave you ever tried to typeset any kind of math and driven yourself almost mad? And have you ended up setting each part of the equation in a different type frame, then piecing it all together and grouping it? I confess that I have done both. But with a little perseverance I figured out a way to do it properly in InDesign, and I’m hoping that this article will prevent you from suffering as long and as hard as I did. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: typesetting

Developing an eye for good design

February 8, 2016 By Glenna Collett 4 Comments

eye_openerIn Book Design Made Simple, we have given you samples and instructions that serve as foundations for your own book designs. And if you follow them, you can be certain that you have produced something very good. But are you confident about your work? Do you think it looks good? Do you wonder if anyone else will think it’s good? Do you worry that if you come up with ideas of your own they might be “bad”? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Cover Design Tagged With: color, typesetting

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