InDesigning.net

It has been quiet here for too long - it is really time to get moving again. A lot of the quietness I have to blame on my holiday, which by the way was great. 3 weeks off work, relaxing with family and friends. And our daughter really have grown a lot the last couple of months, and as late as today she began walking on her own - in other words, she is now aware she is capable of walking, earlier she didn't dare to walk unless she didn't think about it.

During the holidays I had the chance of taking wedding photos of friends of mine, and I would like to just share a few of the photos here. The rest can be found on Flickr.

Multi-exposure shot of the happy couple.

Rock star bride.

This post, I am sorry, is just an update on the situation - no real InDesign goodies for you right now. Please contact me if you have ideas for topics, and I will gladly write about it. But as an InDesign related event, I can share that i took the Adobe Certified Expert InDesign CS4 exam last week and passed. And I must admit the test was harder than expected, but luckily I passed it anyways.

Another slightly InDesign related news, is that we finished our Design & Production bible at 2Krogh. The book is a joint project with Jongbloed and is a book describing every step in Bible production from design through typesetting, prepress, paper selection, printing and binding to logistics, distribution and warehousing.

11 of our Bible and Hymnbooks design are printed on 8 different paper qualities, weights and tints from Bolloré, with different secondary PMS colours. This is really a unique book, and I can't wait to show it off.

Currently the book is not for sale, but as soon as it is, if it will be, I will make sure to let you know.

Design & Production bible.

Design & Production bible.

Design & Production bible.

I would like to introduce a new series of blog posts on InDesigning.net - "Ask InDesigning.net". I love to help people out with their frustrations, problems, issues or whatever with InDesign, often doing this on Twitter anyways, so why not collect some of the most common problems and answer them in a series of articles here on the blog?

If you have any general questions, e.g. "How can I handle multiple indexes?", "What is the easiest way of formatting a table" or "How can I solve this GREP search specific issue?", I will try to answer them as good as I can, and if I stumble across things I cannot answer I will try to research it or get another person to write the answer instead.

If you have any questions, please comment it on the blog, contact me or tweet me.

With more regular followers on the blog I think it is time to throw out a request for wishes of new guides, features and scripts.

Do you have any specific requests or ideas for new topics or series of articles, I would really like to hear them. I can't promise I'll write about everything, but I will prioritise user requests.

Also, I would like to hear what content you prefer prioritised on the blog, guides on different user levels, scripts, screencasts etc. - be sure to add further comments below.

Otherwise, I am always open to suggestions for new things, guest posts etc. Just comment here or contact me on Twitter.

Based on the principles of my Creating and organising styles article, I have created an InDesign document with a bunch of predefined styles.

The styles are build quite logical and easy to modify.

The idea is for you to download and get a great head start for creating styles for a project, or simply just to use them for eg. a CV, brochure, newsletter etc.

The template is based on using an OpenType Serif/Sans-Serif mix, and in this case I have used FontFont's Meta Serif/Sans Pro, but can easily be changed to another pair of fonts.

Use the style for creating eg. CV's.

Support for multiple levels of bullet and numbered lists.

Besides directly using or modifying the styles, exploring the file will give you some great ideas of how to achieve different things through paragraph and character styles.

The file contains the following features and more:

• Semantically named paragraph and character styles
• 3 subheading levels, with and without automatic numbering
• Bullet and numbered lists in 2 levels
• Paragraph with and without indents
• Drop cap paragraph
• Quote
• Table style
• Text box styles
• Caption
• Text formatting styles
• Footnote layout

Styles for tables.

The InDesign file contains table styles, character styles and paragraph styles. To import these in another document you need to use "Load All Text Styles..." from the paragraph style panel menu, and "Load Table and Cell Styles..." from the table panel menu.

Download a PDF to see the different styles or download the InDesign file to get started.

The file is made in Adobe InDesign CS4.

For a long time I have been really frustrated at the sort options in InDesigns index panel.

We do a lot of really complicated books with huge indexes, and mainly these books are in Danish. As you might know, the Danish alphabet is identical to the English, but with three additional letters: Æ, Ø and Å.

You can change the sort options in the index panel.

Changing the sort order to Danish/Norwegian.

The InDesign index only alphabetises from A to Z, but the Sort Options was made to change this. The sort options window lets you prioritise the order of how InDesign should alphabetise, and it works perfectly - for the first letter alone.

I have created a small list of words, using these special characters, and listed them as InDesign would sort them with Danish/Norwegian alphabetising:

• ÆA
• ÆÅ
• ÆB
• ØA
• ØÅ
• ØB
• ÅA
• ÅÅ
• ÅB

Note that the first letter are alphabetised correctly, but the following letters are "ignored", or at least treated as another letter. Æ's and Å's are treated as A's and Ø's are treated as O's.

The correct order would instead be:

• ÆA
• ÆB
• ÆÅ
• ØA
• ØB
• ØÅ
• ÅA
• ÅB
• ÅÅ

I reported the issue as a bug to Adobe and got a kind e-mail reply with an easy fix. Besides changing the sort options to "Danish/Norwegian", changing the documents default language would do the trick.

Make sure you don't have anything selected at all, then launch your character panel (CMD/CTRL+T) and select "Danish" from the language drop down.

Changing the document default language to Danish does the trick.

Note: Even double A's (AA) will be treated as Å's now!