Create Custom Grids

Suppose you have a publication with set column widths. You may not want to reset your columns or drag out multiple guides just to create tables or gridded content. The guides and Step and Repeat features in Adobe® InDesign® 1.5 make it easy to quickly create a custom grid to structure your content. This tip tells you how.

Adobe (2003). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Creating a Template (Part I): The Basics

The natural tendency of most users of word processing applications is to create a document and use it as a model for future documents. That is, you format a letter the way you want all (or most) of your letters to look, save it, and then, when you want to write a letter, open this document and save it under another name as the starting point for your letter. In WordPerfect, until recently, this was the only way to create a template. Word uses a different approach.

Barnhill, Suzanne. Word MVP Site, The (2005). Articles>Document Design>Software>Microsoft Word

Creating Interactive Documents for PDF  

Learn how to add movies, sound clips, and interactive buttons to an Adobe InDesign CS document. When you export the document to Adobe PDF, readers can view movies, play sound clips, and activate buttons in Adobe Acrobat. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add a movie and buttons that play, pause, resume, and stop the movie in the exported PDF document.

Adobe (2004). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Creating PDF Documents from HTML Documents

In this topic, you will create PDF documents from HTML documents.

Adobe. Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Creating Tables in FrameMaker

Tables make information easy to find and understand and are often used for illustrating comparisons among similar data. A table usually consists of a heading row and one or more body rows and may also contain a title.

McMurrey, David A., Jana Owens, Jacqueline J. Pulido and Thomas A. Moore. Illuminati Online (2004). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Cropping Pages to Highlight Areas in Acrobat

When you receive a PDF that contains, say, an image that is surrounded by text, how do you highlight the image? One way is to export the graphic to an imaging application such as Photoshop, but that involves additional applications and the associated loading times. A great 'quick and dirty' fix here is to use the 'Crop' tool to hide the content that surrounds the image, leaving you with PDF which displays only an image, just the way you wanted it. This tip explains how.

Shea, Dan. PlanetPDF (2006). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Custom Stamps in Acrobat

While Acrobat comes pre-loaded with a selection of stamps, including 'Approved', 'Declined' and 'Accepted', users can also create custom stamps of such things as company logos for use on their PDF documents. Complex or graphically rich stamps can be created or prepared in imaging applications before being added to Acrobat's selection. This tip explains how to create a custom stamp using an existing file.

Shea, Dan. PlanetPDF (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Custom Toolbar

We recently converted our documents from Word to FrameMaker. Most of the people in my department had been using Word for years and had grown accustomed to applying character formatting using key commands or buttons on the toolbar. I was afraid that they would use the same methods in FrameMaker simply out of habit, rather than using character tags.

Henkel, Rick. Docspages. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Customizing Strokes Styles

With Adobe InDesign® you can create and edit custom dash, dot, and stripe stroke styles, giving you more control and freedom over how strokes look in your publications. You can also save the stroke styles you create, and then use them over and over again in other InDesign publications.

Adobe (2003). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Designing a Distinctive Table

When you're working with complex data, a table may be your best option. Often, a logical series of rows and col-umns can communicate more clearly than paragraphs. Adobe® InDesign® 2.0 introduces a robust table feature that makes it easy to line up those rows and columns—and to format them in striking ways. Here we show you how you can make an easy-to-read table while using the graphical power of InDesign to integrate it into the style of your document.

Cole, Tim. Mac Design Magazine (2003). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Designing Text to Flow Around Objects

Wrapping text around objects—from basic shapes or frames to images with clipping paths—can give any publication a unique look and feel. In this tutorial, you’ll learn several ways to work with text wrap in Adobe InDesign® to achieve the look you want.

Adobe. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Desktop Printing with QuarkXPress

Have you ever wondered why, no matter how much time you spend trying to find an option for it in QuarkXPress, you just cannot get that picture to print the way you want it? Be happy, or may be not, because it is not that you are overlooking the right options in the program. The option just does not exist in all versions of QuarkXPress prior to version 6.

Bruno, Elisabetta. About.com. Design>Document Design>Software>QuarkXPress

Desktop Publishing Shootout

Whatever the subject of lists I follow, two basic questions usually come up about every three months. Usually the person posting the question has to make a decision between: Pagemaker or Quark (and often FrameMaker), or Macintosh or PC.

Haugen, Diane. Document Design (2001). Articles>Document Design>Software

A Distiller Primer

Can somebody explain what the process of distilling is -- in simple terms?

Publish. Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Document Hack (A Technical Writer's Journal): From Acrobat to FrameMaker

FrameMaker is the industry standard for writing book-length documents. It is a powerful program capable of creating books of well over a thousand pages. The learning curve for the program is significant. FrameMaker is a much different animal than Microsoft Word and other word processors.

Hewitt, John. Writer's Resource Center (2004). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Document Hack (A Technical Writer's Journal): The Acrobat and the Illustrator

Using Acrobat, you can make minor edits to a PDF file, but Acrobat documents are very sensitive. Typing a single character can throw several lines off, destroy tables and cause all sort of other troubles. Alternately, it can be relatively uneventful and painless. You will not know until you type in that character.

Hewitt, John. Writer's Resource Center (2004). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Document Layout Concepts (Frames and All That)

The primary reason to use Framemaker is the power that it offers in managing long and possibly technically complex documents. And while detailed control of the formatting of every paragraph and character is important, the overarching concern is overall structure and layout on a document- or book-wide basis. As the product's name announces, at the heart of FrameMaker's structure and layout paradigm is the 'Frame'. Yet I found the user documentation on the actual subject of frames to be perplexingly opaque. Frames are mentioned here and there, and what is described is not incorrect. But nowhere in the user docs is there a concise and complete discussion of this central FrameMaker feature -- which tends to stall efforts to actually get started on using FrameMaker in a productively-planned manner. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that the FM learning curve is infamously steep precisely because this conceptual core is so ill illuminated. So, determined to dispell the fog (at least for me!), I resorted to studying the very helpful Programmers' Reference and Guide, and built a MIF-Browser tool to get to the bottom of the matter. Herewith is an effort to clarify what to me seem the essentials needed for productive use of FrameMaker, condensed in one place.

Wideman, Graham. WidemanOne. Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Document Setup in Adobe InDesign CS

In this topic, you will set up a new document in Adobe InDesign CS.

Adobe. Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Dragging and Dropping

There are a number of ways in which you can use drag and drop to get content in and out of InDesign. Here are my favorites: If you ever get a lot of content for a layout delivered to you in a folder full of images, logos, text files, etc., there's a fast and easy way to get the files into InDesign that will enable you to avoid placing them one by one.

Cole, Tim. Mac Design Magazine (2005). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Dragging and dropping into InDesign  

There are a number of ways in which you can use drag and drop to get content in and out of InDesign.

Cole, Tim. Adobe Evangelists (2006). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Efficiency: It's Not Just for Production Monkeys

With a few free tools from software companies and other users, you can carve out more time for what you really love -- creativity.

Ashcroft, Sean. Creative Pro (2007). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe InDesign

Felicitous Frames  

There are plenty of things in life worth fearing, but frame-based layout isn't one of them. If you've been using PageMaker 6.5 but haven't explored frames yet, here's your chance to find out just how much fun you've been missing.

Kvern, Olav Martin. Adobe Magazine (1998). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe PageMaker

The Form Revolution, Part II  

In Part I, you got PDF forms to run and talk. Now you get to make them really smart.

Guthrie, Malcolm. Adobe Magazine (2000). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat

Frame-User

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Frame-User.de. (German) Resources>Software>Document Design