Building Books and Other Long Documents

Nigel French Returns!

Back in 2013 a world-renown graphic designer based in Brighton on the south coast of England spoke on "A Media Synthesis with InDesign at the Center" to the second largest crowd in LAIDUG's history. That designer is crossing the pond again in June and we've snagged him.

Meeting Topic: Building Books and Other Long Documents

Learn efficient techniques, elegant solutions, and insider hacks for creating beautiful books and long documents—and without taking years off your life expectancy. Whether you’re building a catalog, a magazine, a proposal, a textbook, or a novel, you’ll want to master these skills!

• It’s all about the planning—building robust documents with master pages, styles, layers, and a flexible layout grid
• Advanced Styles—nested, sequential, GREP, and object
• Keep it live—page and section markers, variables, captions, and cross-references.
• The age-old debate: Libraries or Snippets?Building an attractive Table of Contents

Location and Parking

The exact building and room at Los Angeles Valley College where the meeting will be held will be announced later. Watch this space, our Facebook page, or your email. Parking, by the way, is free and plentiful.

Meeting Notes

By Alvin Takamori

In a continuing effort to spread knowledge about InDesign to all corners of Los Angeles County, on June 18, the Los Angeles InDesign User Group met at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys. It was a long trek through rush hour traffic for some, but a convenience for anyone who lives in the Valley.

Wherever you came from, no one traveled as far as our guest speaker Nigel French, a graphic designer, artist author and trainer from the UK. He wrote InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign. He also writes about type in a column for InDesign Magazine and contributes to the training library of lynda.com.

A full room saw Nigel explain some of his techniques to work efficiently in InDesign to produce books and long documents. An important step he described is to take the time to plan and setup your InDesign document. Create a flexible master page with grid lines for the margins, columns and rows. Nigel used guides to divide the page into 12 columns. He could then overlay separate layers with 2, 3, 4 and 6 columns using the 12 column master page as a guide.

Similarly, he divided the page horizontally, line by line with a number gauge in another layer on the side. This allows him to find a specific element on any page by referring to the exact line where it is located. Turn on Align Text to Grid and the grid values will override the type leading. For instance, if you created a grid of lines separated by 12 points, text with 13 point leading would jump to 24 points.

Another way to keep a document organized is to maintain order using layers. Nigel creates one layer for text and another for pictures. Those might be subdivided into more layers depending on the content. A repeating element like a logo should be made into a Library Item and to keep track of it, regardless of which layer you paste it into, make sure you have Paste Remembers Layers checked.

Another organizational feature to use is Section Markers under Layout, Numbering & Section Options. Typically, you might place a section marker at the beginning of each chapter in a book. Also, the opening page of each chapter usually looks different from other pages, so you could set up a Paragraph Style for that.

After establishing a basic setup Nigel pointed out some shortcuts that can be used to save time. First, organize fonts. Nigel uses Typekit to manage his font library. He recommends designating the most commonly used fonts as favorites, so that you aren’t wasting time searching for them. You’ll also want to do the same for the glyphs that you use the most.

Nigel likes using scripts for shortcuts. There is a script that takes the columns from a single text frame and breaks them up into separate frames or takes separate frames and joins them into one with multiple columns. There are also scripts to take threaded (connected) text frames and break them into independent frames or to join individual frames together. You could also use a script to break a thread to one text frame and skip to the next frame.

Nigel demonstrated a lot during his brief presentation. He provided tips using the Story Editor, Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, Style Sequences, Nested Styles, the Find and Change feature, Mapping Word Styles and GREP Styles.

Text frames in Object Styles can have Paragraph Styles imbedded in sequence so that you can instruct it to apply one style then the next one. Graphic Frames in Object Styles should have the Frame Fitting option set. If you choose Auto-Fit and same gutters, placing the cursor in the gap between graphic frames you can live-adjust the spacing and the images automatically adjust to the change in frame size.

In summary, there are seven features of InDesign that Nigel French uses to work efficiently in a book or long document. First, he sets up Master Pages and grids. Second, he organizes Layers. Third, he creates Paragraph Styles. Fourth, he creates Character Styles, which should be kept to a minimum, because whenever possible it’s better to place rules in Paragraph Styles. Fifth, he creates Object Styles. Sixth, he creates and names swatches. Seventh, he uses Library Items. In CC a Paragraph Style can be stored in the Library, which is easier to share with other documents.

Our gratitude to Nigel for sharing some of his expertise. He covered a lot of information, more than this summary can cover. To capture the details of the steps Nigel took to do things in InDesign, you really needed to be at the meeting, even if it was in the Valley.

Downloads

PDF listing scripts, plug-ins, articles and movies related to long documents graciously provided by Nigel French

Farthest Attendee

The person who travels the farthest specifically to attend the meeting will receive a brand new product from Insider Software­—Expo Creative Asset Manager for Mac, a product worth $149. (We may have to check your driver's license to verify.) For more information on this new product go here. Winner — Alonna Farrar

Raffle Prizes and Winners

eDocker CREATE! 6 month subscription. Value $774.00 Winner — Daniel Carmin

Adobe Creative Cloud. 12 month subscription. Value $599.88 Winner — Rupert Reyneke

Stock Layouts. Full access to Stock Layout template library. 3 month subscription. Value $299.00 Winner — Param Sharma

Markzware. Any single product. 12 month subscription Winner — Heidi Okuhara

Font Agent Pro 6 from Insider Software. Value $99.95 Winner — Rupert Reyneke

InMotion Hosting. Web hosting and free domain. Value $90.00 Winner — Alan Gilbertson

Fotolia. 3 month subscription. 5 images per month. Value $50.00 Winner — Saul Miller

O'Reilly Media. Ebook. Value to $50.00 Winner — Heidi Okuhara

TypeDNA. Font management software. Value $49.00 Winner — Rupert Reyneke

Digital-Tutors. 1 month subscription. Value $29.00 Winner — Param Sharma, Jasper Johal

LA Web Professionals Group meeting tickets. Value $7.99 (four raffles) Winner — Alvin Takamori, Dallas Dorsett Mathers, Rupert Reyneke, Pat Cates

About the Presenter

Nigel French

Nigel French is a graphic designer, photographer, and design teacher, based in Lewes, UK. He is the author of InDesign Type, and coauthor of The Type Project Book, and The Photoshop Visual Quickstart Guide. Nigel has recorded more than fifty titles for the LinkedIn Learning online training library, contributes regularly to CreativePro Magazine, and speaks at CreativePro Week and Adobe MAX. His website is nigelfrench.com.