Writing in Indesign

📖 The Scoop

Get control of your bookThis book is for authors wanting to guide the editorial focus into realizing the vision of their book. This is writing and book design as a creative experience where the writer is totally immersed in the book-directing the content to communicate the conceptual basis of the book clearly with the readers. Harness your writing skills to the most powerful page layout program on the planet in the context of on-demand publishing where multiple formats, print and ebook, are at your fingertips. Publish your book for free, if necessary. No matter what, the control you need for good stewardship is built into the process of publishing and release to the general public.Within a few days of completion, you can have your book available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore, NookBooks, and Kindle. You control the price. You control the royalties. It's your book!I want to say some brief words of welcome as you start though my newest book. As the result of an email conversation I had with a new friend who is working on her book, it became obvious that what I am doing which is unique is working creatively within InDesign to produce completed books almost as a fine art exercise.One of the wonderful things about the new publishing paradigm is the control we get as artists, authors, and designers over the entire package. A modern book is released in multiple sizes, versions, and formats. The content and design remain fluid as we shape the book while we learn and grow. We can easily adjust content, layout, and presentation of our books after they are released in response to emails, FaceBook friends, twitter posts, and the whole host of contemporary social networking online.One of the trials of the new paradigm is the incredible amount of knowledge and the various skills necessary to do all of this. I have been uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new workflow. I began as a fine artist in the 1960s and early 1970s. I learned typesetting and graphic design at the hands of a masterful art director in the late 1970s. I spent a decade as an art director myself in the largest commercial printer in Albuquerque.I began teaching these materials in 1991. Within a couple of years a large traditional publisher was asking me to convert my handouts to a book on the new digital printing. I used that opportunity to develop the first all digital printing and design curriculum in the country (as far as I can tell). I wrote a book a year for them on typography, FreeHand, Illustrator, Photoshop, and finally InDesign. Publishing with InDesign was one of the first books on the new software that would eventually take over the industry,While all of this was going on, in 1996, I took all my coursework online. I became involved intensively with the distance learning initiative at my community college. I continued to write new instructional materials. I was supplying them to my students off the class Website as downloadable PDFs. Then I found Lulu.With Lulu, then CreateSpace, then Scribd, then Zazzle, then Kindle, and then ePUBs, my world changed. Writing books became a real joy to me as InDesign kept getting better and better. More and more I was doing everything in InDesign except the photos.This book contains an extravagant amount of additional training in the appendicesTo keep the reading experience of the book intact and comfortable I moved four major sections into appendices.Appendix A: Basic TypographyPage 91Here you get the information you need to use fonts professionally. This covers why and how typesetting (what we do in InDesign) differs from typewriting (what we do in Word and Office).Appendix B: Setting up stylesHere is step by step instruction on how to set up paragraph and character styles, plus an intro to object styles.Appendix C: Design and ePUBAppendix D: Repairing the XHTML and CSS

Genre: Computers / Design, Graphics & Media / Graphics Tools (fancy, right?)