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The Control panel is teeming with hidden shortcuts to other panels, preferences, and dialog boxes. Here’s not one, but seven maps, to reveal them all.

When you’re creating interactive PDF files, hiding your sound files is surprisingly tricky. Here are a couple of tricks to help.

Frustrated by the stacking order of objects being the opposite of what you want? Keith shows how to control this with Step & Repeat.

Check out these great new tools for InDesign users, all with free trials!

How to type feet and inch marks and then use GREP styles to automatically format them as prime and double prime characters.

Learn how to build a cool custom license plate with InDesign FX and pick up some key tips to use with all FX as you go.

There’s a subtle secret to making InDesign correctly even out the vertical spacing between chunks of text.

An August avalance of blogs posts, articles, links, and videos

Turns out those fields for adjusting text’s Horizontal and Vertical Scale can actually come in quite handy!

Within this tut we are going to explore the Grid and Live Distribute features. The following information will help you create fast grids as well as explaining how to distribute frames quickly. Let’s begin!

Step 1
Create a new document by going…

Do you wish you could just design a website without having to worry about writing or editing code? A new product called Adobe Muse promises to make this designers dream finally happen.

Amazon’s Kindle Publishing Team released a new help file to help InDesign users publish to the Kindle, and the file itself practices what it preaches: it’s an InDesign document. Neat.

Listen in your browser: InDesignSecrets-154.mp3 (17.8 MB, 34:27 minutes)

See the Show Notes for links mentioned in this episode.

Writing in InDesign: why would you write from scratch in a page-layout program?
Our first-ever What-The-Heck (WT…

Check out these new videos from InDesignSecrets contributor (and now lynda.com author) Mike Rankin!

Most people understand the basics of selecting text like double and triple click, but there are a surprisingly large number of shortcuts to help you get the perfect text selection.

Bunches of articles, some awesome videos, good references… you need this stuff!

By using the pathfinder panel within InDesign CS5 it is possible to create a compound frame that can be used to import an image to create a unique effect. Find out more about Compound Frames at the jump.

Step 1
Start by creating a number of frames t…

David says no one in their right mind would edit an InDesign file directly off a server, Anne-Marie says he’s stuck in an early 90′s time warp. So we ask an expert.

Sure, you could make EPUB in InDesign CS5 and earlier, but we think you’d be crazy not to upgrade to 5.5 and use these awesome new EPUB features!

Listen in your browser: InDesignSecrets-153.mp3 (16.9 MB, 30:27 minutes)

See the Show Notes for links mentioned in this episode..

Tables Tables Tables! Answers to:

Table styles with column widths?
Find (and change) tables with Find/Change?…

The Gap Tool can be used to adjust the white-space in-between and around page items. This tool holds the ability to allow the user to work quickly with item heavy layouts as well as viewing real-time changes.

Step 1
The Gap Tool is an awesome tool …

Compare styles, create styles automatically, create style reports, remove local overrides… it’s a must-have!

You can create charts and graphs on the fly from live text with the ingenious font Chartwell.

Scripts, videos, blog posts… oh my, we have a lot of good links for you today!

You can design and create your own working InDesign panel in 5 minutes!

The introduction of the Auto-Fit feature to CS5 should not be over looked. By the end of this Quick tip you – the designer – will be able to save some valuable time when importing images and graphics. Let’s take a look.

Step 1
To o…

How to tell InDesign to stop scaling images when the dimensions change

Adobe stopped shipping their free InDesign templates with CS5. Now you can find them again… here!

From EPUB to Lion, from DPS to CS5, we have (links to) it all!

Listen in your browser: InDesignSecrets-152.mp3 (24.2 MB, 44:52 minutes!)

See the Show Notes for links mentioned in this episode.

Keyboard shortcut “of the week”
Interview with Ron Bilodeau, InDesign Master at O’Reilly Media
Incredibly gee…

Advertise hereDid you know that you can add movie and sound files to an InDesign CS4 project letting you build an Interactive document? In this Quick Tip you’ll learn how to embed files and export your final work to Adobe PDF.

Introduction
Thi…

How you can make a table of contents with thumbnail images (and avoid a horrible crashing bug)

You might want to set page breaks in an EPUB using two different paragraph styles in InDesign CS5.5. Here’s how.

EPUB and HTML exports are more accessible with descriptive ALT tags you can apply with CS5.5′s Object Export Options. This script adds the missing “Apply to All” function.

Learn InDesign with three simple rules: read, watch, and play!

Did you know that tables can span multiple columns in a frame? Keith shows you how.

Ever look at one of the crash reports that InDesign generates and wish you knew what to look for? InDesign guru John Hawkinson shows the way.

You don’t always have to figure out all the GREP codes yourself! Here’s a bunch of examples to help you out.

The Articles panel in InDesign CS5.5 solves headaches that have been plaguing InDesign users for years!

Advertise hereThe notes mode is perfect for adding comments to existing copy within an InDesign document. Notes can be added, but are not visible in the body of the text, instead these notes are hidden and can be viewed in the Notes panel or Story Edit…

Advertise hereThe Track Changes panel is a handy feature that gives the user the ability to view all significant changes made to an existing story. Changes can be kept for reference or discarded once checked and approved. The feature can also be useful…

Back by popular demand: more video podcasts! James Fritz shows us how to link text stories in CS5.5

Em Software’s DocsFlow heralds a breakthrough in collaborative publishing!

Happy summer/winter reading for every InDesign user

Video formats for digital publishing can be confusing, but using the H.264 format seems to work best most of the time.

Using the CS5 Split Columns feature causes InDesign to ignore any “Keep Options” assigned to the text. Here’s a workaround.

You old-thyme compugraphic users should know that InDesign can make auto-tabs, using a little used white space character

Advertise hereThe Track Changes panel is a handy feature that gives the user the ability to view all significant changes made to an existing story. Changes can be kept for reference or discarded once checked and approved. The feature can also be useful…

In which an exploration of why a PDF file is too large leads to two discoveries and an awesome tip

Listen in your browser: InDesignSecrets-151.mp3 (24.2 MB, 44:52 minutes!)

See the Show Notes for links mentioned in this episode.

PePCon 2011 recap: It was great! Let’s do it again! ;-D
Marijan’s new Acrobat script (lets you create form fiel…