Introduction

Welcome to the Adobe InDesign CS Bible your personal guide to a powerful, full-featured publishing program that offers precise but flexible control over all aspects of page design. My goal is to guide you each step of the way through the publishing process, showing you how to make Adobe's InDesign CS also known as InDesign 3 work for you. You'll also learn tips and tricks about publishing design that you can use in any document, whether it was created in InDesign or not.

Taking the best from the two schools of thought on desktop publishing, InDesign merges the highly structured approach of programs such as QuarkXPress and Corel Ventura Publisher with the more naturalistic approach of Adobe PageMaker, which InDesign all but replaced in 1999. Thus, InDesign offers a wide range of desktop-publishing capabilities for sophisticated designers who develop magazines, books, ads, and product brochures . It also gives the power of the press to individuals and groups who use the program's impressive set of publishing tools to communicate their thoughts, dreams, and philosophies.

Version CS of InDesign takes that strong basis and makes it even better, often in subtle ways meant to make the workflow process easier and more intuitive. InDesign was chock-full of features in its previous version, but the features could be hard to find and awkward to use because of a slavish mirroring of the Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator user interfaces. Although InDesign adheres strongly to that core Adobe interface, it's been tweaked to work more naturally for a layout artist's needs.

InDesign also lets you take advantage of electronic publishing. Not only can you produce high-quality , lively flyers, newsletters, magazines, and similar publications in InDesign, you can also create rich, colorful documents that can be viewed on the Web, distributed by CD, or sent directly to a printing press for faithful print reproduction.

In a nutshell , InDesign is meant to help those who educate, inform , and document the world in which we live. Join me in learning how to use this powerful program.

What This Book Offers

So, since InDesign comes with good documentation that is full of examples, why do you need this book? To see the bigger picture. Publishing design involves much more than understanding a particular program's tools it involves knowing when, how, and, most important, why to use them. In this book, I help you realize the potential of InDesign by applying its tools to real-world publishing-design needs. I also identify any weaknesses and explain how to overcome them something that vendor manuals rarely do.

Some desktop publishers have years of high-end creative, design- intensive experience. Others are just getting started in publishing, perhaps by producing simple newsletters or flyers to advertise a community event. Not a few are exploring the brave new world of Web publishing.

Desktop publishers fall into several classes:

• Designers new to InDesign but familiar with other desktop publishing software

• Designers familiar with print publishing but new to electronic publishing

• Experienced designers new to desktop technologies

• Novice designers new to desktop technologies

No matter which class you're in, you'll find that this book addresses your needs. You don't need a degree in design or ten years' experience producing national ad campaigns you can use this book if you're responsible for developing and implementing the look of documents, whether a four-page company newsletter or a four-color billboard ad. The basic techniques and issues are the same for both ends of the spectrum. And this book, of course, covers in detail the specialized needs such as table creation, image control, color output, and electronic publishing of specialty designers. (If you're just learning such advanced techniques, be sure to read the sidebars that explain the underlying issues.) Regardless of your level of experience with desktop publishing, this book will help you use InDesign.

What distinguishes this book from the rest is that it does not attempt to substitute for the documentation that accompanies InDesign. Instead, it guides you through the process of publishing a document, regardless of whether that document is your first or your thousandth.