[Dwayne Smith]

G’day Robert

It depends on which version of InDesign you’re working with.

If you have CS4 or below, then that’s the best way to get your images to move with your text as it reflows.

CS5 is much MUCH better — you now have a little blue ‘anchor control’ near the top right corner of your image frame — just drag that little blue dot to the place in the text you want to anchor the frame to — then drag the frame to where you want it to sit.

As text reflows the frame will move with it — but now you can also easily reposition the frame manually without breaking the anchor — the image frame is a lot more independent now.

Hope that makes sense

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day Clare

Select all your text boxes.
Click the little ‘T’ at the top of the swatches panel.
Click on your red colour in the swatches panel.

You should get in the habit of applying paragraph or character styles to your text — then you just need to update the style, rather than having to mess around with the text frames.

Hope that helps.
m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day

InDesign is a fantastic program. There are others, but for value-for-money, I don’t think you could do better. I’ve not heard of any freeware/shareware that could do what you’re looking for.

Version 2.00 is about ten years old, so you could have issues with compatibility with your current operating system and whatnot (??).

Personally I wouldn’t go for anything earlier than version CS (the CS range are the latest versions). I’m using CS2 at home and it easily does everything you could need — unless you’re looking at making your book interactive.

I expect version 2.00 would meet your requirements too, just so long as you could get it up and running.

Good luck with your exciting project.

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day

Did you also trash the .idlk file that would have been generated in the same folder as the .indd file?

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day

Unfortunately, layer visibility isn’t something you can synchronise in a book file (as far as I know — check the synchronise options for your version to confirm).

You can do the layer thing with a simple applescript — but for that you need all the files open. Paste this into Script Editor :
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS4" --update this to your version
tell every document
set visible of layer "YourExactLayerName" to true -- or false as needed
end tell
end tell

I’ve not worked with conditional text before so, sorry, can’t help you there.

Hope that helps a little.

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day

Rather than leaving your export ppd as device independent — choose a ppd (probably doesn’t matter much which one) and set your paper size to custom (it should load your paper size in the relevant width and height fields automatically).

So, rather than this :

You should have something like this :

That way you are specifying a particular paper size rather than letting Preview do the PDF conversion using whatever generic size it works with.

Hope that helps

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day

In CS2 you would open your paragraph panel and choose Single Line Composer from the dropdown menu. This is a paragraph level preference, so you only need to have your cursor somewhere within the paragraph to change the composer preference.

I guess it’s something similar in other versions too.

Hope that’s what you’re looking for.

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day

I haven’t worked on ePubs for 12 months, so things may have changed — but here are a few things that were true then :

ePub doesn’t really have ‘pages’ in the same way as books and pdfs do. the reason for this is that epub is reflowable — the end user can control the font, type size, etc. So, you can’t specify page breaks.

You can start each new chapter on a new page. But to do this from InDesign you needed to have each chapter as a separate InDesign file and then use the book function to compile and export.

You need to format ALL text with paragraph and character styles if you want to have any control over spacing and whatnot. Just laying it out on the page is not enough. This is because the CSS that InDesign builds for the ePub is generated from the styles.

The only way I found to get good control over the look of text was to break open the finished ePub — clean up the xhtml and css — then repackage it. Very cumbersome process. Things may have improved with CS5 (?)

Hope this helps a bit.

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

Historically, InDesign has been a page layout program — used for designing everything from a business card to a billboard; from a leaflet to a text book. It’s the best way to combine text, graphics and photos into a single document. These days it’s also used to create digital publications (including interactivity, video and audio) and you can even build entire web pages from within InDesign.

m.

[Dwayne Smith]

G’day Jon

You’re probably viewing the document in Preview mode (this hides all the guides and bleeds and frame edges and whatnot — for ‘clean’ viewing)

Go to : View menu > Screen Mode and choose normal.

This setting is also at the bottom of your tools panel. You can also toggle between the two settings by hitting a ‘w’ (but don’t do this when you have the text tool active — obviously).

Hope this helps

d.