Among many exciting new and improved features in InDesign CS3, the totally re-imagined Find/Change function is among my favorite top five. The first time I opened the Find/Change dialog I was literally stunned into silence (shutting me up is not an easy task). What about it could possibly silence, even for a moment, this opinionated…

You probabaly already know that you can type into just about any of InDesign’s measurement fields a value based on any measurement system InDesign understands. For instance, if the document uses pica for measurement, you can still specify height, width, and numerous other values in inches by typing X in (for inches [also “ and…

When laying out portraits or headshots close together, such as in a newspaper or magazine article or publications like membership directories and yearbooks, the golden rule is that all photo subjects’ heads should be the same size. In most cases regardless of background and pose, Fred’s head should be the same size as Themla’s, Daphne’s,…

A trio of (occasionally useful) tips for working with measurement fields to resize and transform type, frames, and other objects. Resize, Move, and Transform by Percentage Ever find yourself in need of cutting something down to half, doubling the size of type, or blowing up an image frame 319.2678%? (No, I don’t think I’ve done…

In Creative Suite 2 Adobe introduced the Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) file format. With it, you can create custom swatch colors in InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, and import them into the rest without having to manually recreate them. Among several ramifications, that means for print output pros fewer instances of the common problem of the…