
I guess you can tell I’m a big fan of InDesign, but that’s because I started out with the t-square and the glue pot. Self-publishing has a strong do-it-yourself tradition, but sometimes it’s quite a bit smarter to get somebody else to do-it-themselves. But if you start off with no experience with design, or with fonts, file formats, scanning, color correction, reproduction requirements of various printers, you have to understand that you have set yourself a gigantic task.Īnd it often seems counter-productive to learn all you would need to know about the program to just do one book. Not that you can’t learn the program, anyone can. When I hear authors who are contemplating self-publishing talk about InDesign, it makes me uneasy.
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It’s truly a jack-of-all trades and the software on which my business runs. To the novice, it can be overwhelming due to the sheer number of control palettes, options, refinements, features, and settings that are available.Īlmost all I use it for is book and cover design, and the amount to learn in just this one application of InDesign is formidable. I have to admit that I have no idea how wide the scope of this program is, because I will likely never use many of its features-maybe no one person could. When designing catalogs and listings, this is an incredible time saver. Recently they added the capability to automatically format repetitive copy, assigning styles to subsequent pieces of copy based on conditions you establish. Vast Array of Features and Capabilities, with AutomationĪdobe keeps putting more and more automation into InDesign as well.
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We can now export in the ePub format, send layout pages to clients as JPG files, or create numerous different PDF formats. Now InDesign increments spacing at ten-thousandths of an inch, can use thousands of fonts, and can just as easily be used for a fine-art book as for a catalog or magazine.Īs InDesign has matured, it has kept adding features and capabilities literally unknown just a short time ago. In the old days, we struggled to align little bits of paper so they would look straight.

InDesign excels at handling all these kinds of files, and at giving the layout artist tremendous precision and control.


