Author: Terry White ISBN: 0321330498 Publisher: Peachpit Press Handbook and DVD 64 pages Published: August 2005 | In this DVD and handbook combination, Terry White does a great job of introducing AdobeR InDesignR CS2. Most books written about graphic software have two parts. The first covers the tools and techniques and the second covers how to apply that knowledge to examples or projects. Let's face it. The first part of these books is always a boring necessity. But this author alleviates that boredom with this DVD in which he discusses the most popular InDesign tools and techniques as well as what's new in CS2. Watching the DVD is much easier than reading 100+ pages of text and it is also a better way to learn. After viewing the DVD, you are ready to tackle the projects in the accompanying handbook. On the DVD, White begins by demonstrating some of the new InDesign templates and the Adobe Bridge. He then covers all the new features that will increase your productivity such as Object Styles, Quick Apply, mapping Word styles to InDesign styles, Anchored Objects and Snippets. Next, he explains the new text features; Dynamic Spelling, Autocorrect Spell-Checking and Drag and Drop Text. Finally, he discusses new publishing features for PDF and HTML formats and the new InBooklet SE to create printer spreads. The DVD comes with a handbook but this is not one of those "user's guides" that you immediately toss into a drawer. In fact the handbook has several interesting projects that help you apply these skills and teach you some new ones along the way. For the novice, the handbook covers basic skills of InDesign with projects such as building a photo book, placing an image inside text and creating a backscreening photo effect much like that popular with PhotoshopR users. For the advanced user White includes more challenging projects such as adding interactive multimedia files to a PDF document, using data merge to dynamically build page content from external text files, building a table of contents with InDesign's automated feature and how to prepare InDesign documents for the printer. Terry White has been with Adobe for seven years and is now the Technical Resources Manager for North America. He also is a columnist for Layers magazine. | |
