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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.

A review of Affinity Publisher

May 11, 2020 By Glenna Collett 58 Comments

Affinity Publisher logoWhy, you might ask, is the coauthor of a book about InDesign reviewing a direct competitor, Affinity Publisher?

Because it’s new and I wanted to check it out.

And because it’s so much more affordable than Adobe’s Creative Cloud: $600 a year for the Adobe suite vs. a one-time total of $0 (yes, it’s free) for the full line of Serif’s products: Publisher, Photo, and Designer. We both got the Affinity software for desktop, and I must say that for the most part, we love it.

The Affinity Publisher app is for desktop use on PCs and Macs. Photo and Designer can also now be used on iPads, so check back on Publisher to see when the iPad version becomes available.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Design Tagged With: typesetting

Design a children’s picture book

March 9, 2020 By Fiona Raven 87 Comments

Group of children's picture books.Children’s picture books are fun to design! They’re colorful, full of images, and everything is packed into a small number of words and pages.

To design a children’s picture book, you’ll need to consider lots of factors: book size, page count, quality of images, flow of text, color, and more. Let’s take a look at those factors. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Design Tagged With: Amazon, children's books, color, images, typesetting

Using InDesign keyboard shortcuts

January 26, 2020 By Glenna Collett 19 Comments

numeric keypad used for InDesign keyboard shortcutsYou 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…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: typesetting

Error importing Word index into InDesign

May 13, 2019 By Fiona Raven 5 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 18 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

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