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Clean your styles, or the resistance guide against local overrides...

Written by Martin Rohart on Monday, 14 May 2012 14:18.

InDesign comes with a very powerful set of tools, that are often underused. Paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, spiced with some table and cell styles. A lot of things can be achieved with these, and I would even dare to say that ALL styling can be defined into style.

(I'll probably regret these words, but I think this is the direction the Adobe team has always aimed at.)

The thing is, all the properties available in the styles are also available in direct tools, and it is often faster to apply the property directly, via that shortcut/handy toolbar icon/menu item, than to edit the property inside a style. So why would I bother using the styles at all? A clear lost of time. Well... not really, I want to believe the contrary, that it is a productivity gain.

Copy and Paste, why this simple command makes your work so inefficient

Written by Mikael Bossel on Tuesday, 17 April 2012 08:03.

First of all, I do a lot of copy and paste and this is probably one of my most used commands. It's really fast and easy, but that is not the problem.

The problem comes when you use instead of doing some thing better.

When you copy something, lets say a text, from one place to another, you get a copy. You now have two instances of this text. If the source text changes, you have to update the copy. If this happens once its fine, but what I'm talking about is the situation where you have hundreds of source texts, and several of copies of each text. This is more frequent than you can imagine.

Google adopts the Adobe eBook DRM

Written by Tobias Johansson on Tuesday, 21 February 2012 08:07.

"Google adopts Adobe eBook DRM" says Dave Dickson in his blog at blogs.Adobe.com. Google have decided to build their Google eBook service platform on Adobe Content Server. Google joins several of the biggest publisher in the world to publish there ebooks using Content Server.

Downgrade InDesign document from CS5.5 to CS5

Written by Tobias Johansson on Thursday, 12 January 2012 08:03.

Having problems with your customers still using CS5 and you on CS5.5? Then this will help you to be able to open the documents in CS5. First thing to do is to download the latest updates from Adobe.com for your InDesign application. You also have tell your customer to upgrade to the latest version of InDesign CS5 to support the latest fixes.

Steps to downgrade:

Select File menu and Export your document in CS5.5 to InDesign Markup (IDML). Save the document.
Send your IDML file to your customer.
The customer opens the IDML file by using File > Open in InDesign CS5.
InDesign creates a new document based on the IDML file.

You find the latest updates here or by using Update features in your InDesing application.

Do you need an feature update of the latest Adobe InDesign releases?

Written by Tobias Johansson on Friday, 25 November 2011 08:03.

Do you feel that Adobe have released a number of InDesign version, and you do not know if you have missed any new feature? Then I have a great comparison sheet that Rufus Deuchler have created. It presents all new features from CS3 to CS5.5 in InDesign. All features is grouped in different areas and described in detail. Thanks Rufus!

Link: http://rufus.typepad.com/files/adobe-indesign-features-updated.pdf

Continuous Integration for CS Extension Builder

Written by Martin Rohart on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 14:18.

So you have some awesome extensions for the Creative Suite, built with Adobe CS Extension Builder 1.5, but you are still exporting them via Flash Builder…

It is high time to build them automatically: if it can’t be automated, it ain't real...

Well, good news, the Adobe Creative Suite team has thought about it, and all the required pieces are available. (They just might be spread a bit all over the place… therefore I compiled the following manual to get started more quickly.) As for Flex or Air applications, ANT is the tool of choice, with specific compilations tasks available in the Flex SDK.