Adobe Indesign CS2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques

by John Cruise and Kelly Kordes Anton

InDesign CS2 is more than just a powerful page layout tool: As part of Adobe's Creative Suite 2 (which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, and Acrobat), it's a key component of a design workflow... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321321901
• ISBN13: 9780321321909
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Adobe Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.4" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Short and to the point

The 272-page "Adobe InDesign CS2 HOW TOs - 100 Essential Elements" by John Cruise and Kelly Kordes Anton provides an excellent resource for the beginner. Both authors are experienced InDesign users and/or certified instructors. Topics range from the basics of the opening screen, creating documents and text frames, typography, tables, lines, shapes, graphics, and objects to managing long documents and creating graphic rich PDF files. Each topic is covered in two to three pages often with one or more side bar hints. The book was written for the beginner and intermediate user in mind and address both MAC and Window applications. "...100 Essential Techniques" contains 11 chapters and an extensive 10-page 3-column index. This one's a keeper! Chapter 1 "Getting Started with InDesign" covers 8 elements from the welcome screen to the toolbox to plug-ins. Chapter 2 " Working with Documents" covers 8 more elements from creation to templates to adjusting the display quality. Chapter 3 "Working with Text" is the largest one with 17 elements ranging from text frames to formats to styles. Chapter 4 "Typography and Tables" addresses 13 elements from special effects to anchoring to table creation and formatting. Please include in future editions how to realign text especially for tables in a landscape format. Chapter 5 "Drawing Lines and Shapes" covers 5 elements including basic and complex features for both. Chapter 6 "Working with Graphics" contains 7 elements ranging from placement to special effects to links. Chapter 7 "Working with Objects" has 15 elements addressing moving, filling, styles, shadows, grouping, stacking, and snippets to name a few. Chapter 8 " Working with color has 5 elements covering spot and process color, gradients, mixed ink, palette, and color management. Chapter 9 "Laying out Pages and Creating Long Documents" has 11 elements ranging from master pages to layers table of content formation. Chapter 10 "Creating Media-rich PDF's" is the smallest with 3 elements of hyperlinks, buttons, and movies and sounds. Chapter 11 "Preflight and Output" has 8 elements ranging from color separations to PDF presets to printer spreads. A few of the figures were approaching magnifying glass readability - please enlarge them a bit in the next edition for my aging be-speckled eyes. Others could use a slight improvement to their resolution to be more readable. Another suggestion for future edition is to narrow down the side bar on each page since it isn't filled extensively with hints so some of the figures can be enlarged slightly to make them more readable. Otherwise, this is a great reference that I'll keep handy.

Covers everything with simplicity

I really enjoy this book because of the many, many aspects of using InDesign that are covered in this book. It quickly addresses nearly every desired thing to do in InDesign with enough info to give you a much more polished document with very little work. It covers the basic - like drawing basic shapes and text frames - to the fairly complex, such as modifying your plug-in preferences and InBooklet imposition. Each topic is summed up in about 2 pages, so you don't have to work your way through a dreary chapter or more to just get the basic How-to for what you want to do. I'll keep this one around for quick reference on things I don't do very often.