InDesign: Beyond the Essentials

Course details

In this course David Blatner builds on his Essential Training series, bringing his knowledge of and passion for Adobe InDesign to lessons that show you how to harness its power and functionality. This installment covers a wide range of advanced topics from interface customization to cutting-edge layout and text-formatting techniques. Learn how to set key application and document preferences, format long documents, match swatches, use GREP styles, and much more.

Learning objectives
Setting preferences
Working with parent and child master pages
Adding alternate layouts
Exporting and importing page snippets
Tracking text changes
Choosing other languages
Aligning to a baseline grid
Applying styles automatically with nested and line styles
Embedding links
Turning image layers on and off
Using the Pathfinder and compound paths
Power scaling and spacing

Concepts

Introduction

Welcome
What you should know before watching this course
Using the exercise files

Managing Your Document Window

Managing more than one document window
Positioning your panels
Setting up Mini Bridge
Saving a workspace
Displaying a new window or split screen
Rotating pages and spreads

Setting Up InDesign and Your New Document

Setting application and document preferences
Learning and editing keyboard shortcuts
Customizing InDesign menus

Layout Techniques

Parent child master pages
Starting a document on a left page
Adding alternate layouts
Saving objects in libraries
Exporting and importing page snippets

Advanced Text and Typography

Filling with placeholder text
Tracking text changes
Choosing other languages
Adjusting text hyphenation and justification
Adding hanging punctuation with Optical Margin Alignment
Controlling orphans and widows with Keep Options
Aligning to a baseline grid
Setting vertical justification and first baseline position

Paragraph and Character Styles

Applying styles automatically with nested and line styles
The basics of GREP styles
Using Break Link to Style
Exploring style groups

Long-Document Text Techniques

Including footnotes
Working with cross-references
Indexing a document
Exploring conditional text

Advanced Graphic Techniques

Importing InDesign files
Advanced Links panel features
Embedding links
Adding live and static captions
Turning image layers on and off

Paths

Using advanced strokes
Using Pathfinder and compound paths
Using InDesign and Illustrator together

Advanced Layout

Power scaling techniques
Making grids
Power spacing
Making objects nonprinting
Default graphics and text frame styles

Conclusion

Going ever deeper with InDesign