The InDesigner Michael Murphy

Learn how to use GREP to describe all items in a list that begin with the same letter, then insert a space between and/or add an alphabetical heading to each alpha group. Covers GREP Find/Change, wildcard/location/found text metacharacters, character sets, marking subexpressions, and backreferences (an undocumented feature).

Launch day for Adobe's Creative Suite 5 is here, and so is my first podcast episode dedicated to the newest version of InDesign. In this episode, I take a look at a number of very cool new features in InDesign CS5. There's a lot more in the new version, but I've focused on some of my favorites, including span/split-column paragraphs, multiple page sizes, simplified transformations, metadata captions, the new Layers panel, and new animation features. This episode is kind of a a long one, but I've included chapter markers so you can quickly jump to the section of the episode you want to see.

Checkboxes and radio buttons and comb fields…oh my! In this episode, I take a look at adding form elements to an InDesign layout to create Acrobat-friendly checkboxes, radio buttons and comb fields, all of which can be achieved with a little help from anchored objects, GREP find/change and tables.
You may also notice new feature added to the podcast starting with this episode: chapters. You can now jump right to a specific part of the lesson using the chapters built into the video file.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of work designing forms, which present their own unique design challenges, one of which is that more forms are being completed digitally as PDFs. As we’ll see in this episode, when you’re designing a form to be as Acrobat-friendly as possible, the same principles that make for a clean, function, well-organized form on the page also lend themselves to fast and easy form field recognition in Acrobat.

Today, Adobe announces the Creative Suite 4 in all of its various iterations (Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and so on). This updated Creative Suite includes another evolutionary and significant new version of InDesign and, in this episode, I take a look at some (but by no means all) of my favorite new features including Smart Guides, Flash export, and GREP Styles.

Inspired by a question from a podcast subscriber about creating a text frame that looks like a folder tab, and with the help of a technique suggested by another subscriber, this episode builds on the potential of Paragraph Rules revealed in Episode 49. By combining Paragraph Rules with First Baseline Offset options, a fully-editable, single-object tab-topped text frame is easy. But it gets easier and more interesting when Object Styles and Effects are added to the mix.