• Join and Average: What’s the Difference?

    I’m often asked: What’s the difference between Join and Average? To set the stage, Join and Average commands are on the Object > Path menu. Select two anchor points with the Direct Selection Tool, then execute the command… And there’s where the differences and similarities come into play. Join: Combines two open paths or two…

  • DTP Tools and Pariah S. Burke Ship Page Control 1.0, A Revolutionary New Plug-in for Adobe InDesign That Breaks the One-Document One-Page-Size Paradigm

    What do you get when a design & publishing workflow expert teams up with a developer with a history of building productivity enhancing InDesign plug-ins?

  • Hanging Punctuation in InDesign

    When trying to achieve a clean edge on the type in your paragraph, one must push the opening punctuation (typically an open-quote) beyond the vertical visual line of alignment–make the puncutuation “hang”. “Hanging puncutation” is astoundingly simple in InDesign. First, select the text frame, then go to the Story palette (if it’s not in your…

  • Asymmetrical Column Guides

    When you create column guides in either the New Document or Margins and Columns dialogs, InDesign evenly distributes the columns between the left and right or inside and outside margins, resulting in symmetrical columns. If you don’t want symmetrical columns, for example if you want a wide inner column and narrow outer column, are you…

  • Too Many Acrobat Windows

    Like Microsoft Word, Acrobat likes to create a new window instance and taskbar entry for every document opened. This is no big deal while reading a single PDF, but if you typically have several open, as I do, the accumulation of all those separate taskbar buttons can be annoying and counter-productive. Afterall, taskbar space is…

  • Transform Objects Just Once, Then Transform Again Automatically

    Rotating, skewing, resizing. These are common tasks. When you must transform multiple objects the same way, say, scaling a page of image frames up to specific X and Y dimensions, it can be tedious. What you may not know is that InDesign CS2 includes commands to end the tedium. Transform your first object by rotating,…