The InDesigner

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,

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: ch

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 themsel

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

Most of us are familiar with the two types of Paragraph Rules, but in InDesign, despite their names, a Rule Above can easily appear below your text, and a Rule Below can just as easily appear above it. This ability to bend the rules, so to speak, can produce some very interesting and flexible type effects that don't require drawing extra frames, grouping anything or relying on anch

At last month's InDesign Conference in Miami, an unexpected blackout cut my typography session short, so my demonstration of OpenType features never saw the light of day (no pun intended). In this episode, I bring that missing part of the presentation to all of you and take a look at several useful OpenType features including Ligatures, Discretionary Ligatures, Contextual Alternate

A subscriber's question about moving and copying layers led me to peel away the layers of the Paste Remembers Layers setting and discover a few things about how it behaves that I wasn't aware of. This episode shares that little discovery with all of you, while providing context for the overall behavior of Paste Remembers Layers, and ending with a tip for combining this feature with

OK...Christmas has already come and gone, I know, but it's still technically the holiday season, and the title of this episode is the title of a Christmas CD project I recently designed. That's the project I showcase in this episode, in which I demonstrate a holiday grab bag of InDesign goodies including: starting a document on a left-hand page, using the Slug area and Text Variabl