Anchored Objects, Tables, Magnified Text Frames, and Powerful Scripts

Sound familiar? If not, then you missed this month's InDesign Magazine.

InDesign Magazine No. 8
InDesign Magazine No. 8

In the October/November issue (issue no. 8) the leg­endary David Blatner reveals a hid­den tech­nique to auto­mat­i­cal­ly scale the point size of type as you resize text frames in the InStep arti­cle, “Make a Magnifying Text Frame.”

Confused by the new InDesign CS2 anchored objects? You aren’t the only one. Well, shiv­er ye tim­bers no more, matey. In an amus­ing (or annoy­ing, you be the judge) InStep arti­cle, “Drop Anchor,” yours tru­ly demys­ti­fies the least under­stood new fea­ture of CS2. If you work in longer doc­u­ments like pro­pos­als, books, mag­a­zines, or cat­a­logs, you need to under­stand anchored objects–for your own san­i­ty. They will save you more time and trou­ble than even Quick Apply.

Tables. You know every­thing you need to know about tables in InDesign CS2, right? Sure–you use them only occas­sion­al­ly, tab delim­i­tat­ed text goes in, you set alter­nat­ing row col­ors, and you’re done. Right? Well, not quite. Tables, as Diane Burns points out, can be used for much more than tab­u­lar data. Don’t believe me? Check it out: Creativepro​.com has excerpt­ed the entire arti­cle in “InDesign How-To: Solve Layout Dilemmas with Tables.”

Even though you can get the low­down on tables as page struc­ture ele­ments above, don’t stop there or you’ll miss Thomas Nielsen, InDesign’s direc­tor of engi­neer­ing, hint­ing about the future of InDesign, begin­ning with InDesign CS3. And you’ll miss reviews of PatternMaker and PatternPack 1.1, Cross-Talk for InCopy, FlightCheck Studio for Adobe InDesign, and more.

(Disclaimer: I’m not com­pen­sat­ed in any­way for encour­ag­ing you to read InDesign Magazine. I do it because it’s a great mag­a­zine that every InDesign user should devour. Well, that and because Terri and David laugh at my jokes.)