Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One by
David Futato
With Over 800 Color Photos And Screen Shots
With Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One, youll quickly learn how to design
professional layouts for print and digital publishing with this program. You
get complete step-by-step instructions and hours of DVD-video
demonstrations with Deke McClellands unique and effective system. Learn
techniques in the book, see how theyre done in the video, and apply the
knowledge to hands-on projects offered in every chapter.
Coauthor David Futatos Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One Top Ten
New Features Roundup David Futato is a full-time freelance designer
and the design mastermind behind the One-on-One book series. Having
worked in design and production in both publishing and advertising for the
last fifteen years, he brings real-world experience to his projects—hes
wrestled with nearly every kind of layout, file format, schedule, press issue,
and client one can imagine. In addition to the One-on-One books, his
credits include the interior book designs for the Animal and Digital Media
series from OReilly Media. David holds a Bachelor of Science in writing
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 10)
Spread-view rotation. If you have landscape pages in your document, this
feature will save you a trip to the chiropractor. Just rotate the spread view

from the Pages palette, and like magic, InDesign suddenly rights itself. 9)
New Style option in dialogs. This may seem like something trivial, but the
amount of time saved adds up quickly. In CS4, whenever you are asked to
specify a style (say, for a nested style or an automatic number), you now
have the option of creating a new style from within the dialog. No more
backing out, creating the new style separately, then heading back to the
original dialog box. 8) The Preflight palette. Quite possibly the biggest
new feature in the bunch. The plethora of options tucked away inside the
Preflight palette may well have designers pulling at their hair (or ignoring
the palette entirely), but prepress folks and standards-sticklers will fall in
love. Real-time preflighting as you work? Awesome. No more surprises
when your files go to the vendor? Even better. 7) GREP nested styles.
This is InDesigns most obtuse new feature, hands down. GREP? Regular
expressions? Still, if your eyes havent glazed over yet, theyre probably
popping. Users with an understanding of regular expressions will love the
power and flexibility of this feature—automatically styling any URL, or
phone number, or anything else that can be found with a regex search,
regardless of where it appears in the paragraph. 6) Contact-sheet
cascade placement. Sure to be the new best friend of catalog-makers,
asset managers, heck, just about anyone with more than a handful of
images to keep track of. Take a stack of images loaded on the Place
cursor, and drag a box on the page. InDesign automatically sizes and
distributes the images in contact sheet form in the box you just drew. 5)
The tabbed-window interface. This is a controversial feature for sure, and
a couple of OS X users are crying foul. Early on, I was one of them—Im a
Mac guy through and through, using Boot Camp to run Windows when
necessary—but I became a tabbed-window convert. You now have the
option of docking every document in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch
documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Just like I could never give up
my tabbed web browsing, Im hooked on the tabbed-window interface in
CS4. 4) Place-gun constrained frames. Even though it may sound
dangerous, in actuality its the best new image placement feature. With an
image loaded onto the place cursor, click and drag—InDesign
automatically constrains the frame to the proportions of the image. Whats
more, it displays the scale percentage of the image on the fly while you
drag. 3) The Links palette. Rebuilt, retooled, and revamped in CS4, the
Links palette is no longer just a place to check for red question marks or
yellow triangles. Split into two panes, the first is the traditional list you know
and love (though now its customizable), and the second gives you more
information than you can imagine about the selected image. Best feature?
You can see the effective PPI directly from within InDesign—something Im
thrilled to finally see. 2) Smart Guides. The Smart Guides are an
amazing collection of... well, its hard to say exactly what they are. How
they work, on the other hand, is straightforward and yet magical—InDesign
compares the object youre working on to those around it on the page, and
snaps into place. The Smart Guides work for aligning, scaling, cropping,
distributing—you name it, theyve got it covered. And the Smart Measure
cursor puts the most relevant dimensions right at the same point as your
mouse, so no more looking back and forth between what youre doing and

what the control palette dimensions say. 1) Cross-references. Sure, its
not flashy (or visually stunning) like Photoshop CS4s OpenGL navigation,
or even InDesigns Smart Guides. And some people may never use the
feature—rarely do you need cross-references in print ads or other single
page documents. But as an author, a book designer, a layout artist—
whatever hat Im wearing at the moment—my bread and butter are books,
and a book without cross-references is little more than a doorstop. Ive
been waiting, no clamoring, for this feature for years. No more entering
five-hundred-plus figure references by hand! The cross-reference formats
are fully customizable and work beautifully across book documents. Best
of all, they automatically translate to links when exported to PDF.
Personal Review: Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One by David
Futato
I read Amazon.com reviews and thumbed through various CS4 InDesign
guides at local retailers for a week before deciding to purchase this book. I
couldn't be happier with my choice to buy the One-on-One guide. This
book and accompanying disc present 3 specific benefits for me:
1. Method. With each chapter, step one is to watch a video (each is
approximately 10 minutes). The video shows an actual project being
manipulated (in high resolution, so you can see all the icons clearly) and
"sets the hook," so to speak, with regard to what the reader will learn in
that chapter. With so many tools and options, it's nice to be able to see
and say, "Oh - THAT'S why it's worth learning." Next is to work, step by
step, through the provided sample exercises. This was much easier for
me than books where the techniques are listed, and then there's an
instruction like, "now, try this on the supplied examples." If you do
something wrong, your document doesn't look like the full-color illustration
in the book, and you know exactly where you went wrong. Last is a little
vocab quiz to ensure you got the key concepts and terms. I find the
approach to be ideal; the work is going quickly and I'm retaining a lot.
2. Detail level. I'm going to need to use InDesign in my work extensively.
Which is not to say that I'm going to be expected to lead seminars on it; I
need to know how to command it in day-to-day operations, and know
enough about the program to consult other sources for the really fine
details that I might not know offhand. This book nails that usage range. I
don't expect to know every keyboard shortcut and every way to manipulate
every character (and am appreciative that the author's scope takes that
into account). But upon its completion, I'll know how to do virtually
everything I'll need to do - and will know enough about the various menus
and functions that I'll be able to get real results when I look up a more
detailed operation online or in a bible-type guide.
3. Tone. Others have complained that Deke needs an opiate:) While I'm
amused at the comment, I respectfully disagree. Sure, he's a tad sales-y,
but he's interesting. No approach could appeal to the entire audience to
whom this book is marketed - but I find that I'm not bored, it's easy to pay

attention to the text in the book as well as the accompanying videos, and I
get the vibe that Deke actually, PERSONALLY knows what he's talking
about and wants you to see what he does and WHY he does it the way he
does. It's easy to see that he has real world expertise; he's not just
reading the same book you are and "presenting" the highlights. Brief,
occasional notes about how the CS4 compares and relates to previous
versions, other Adobe products, and competing products like Quark and
PageMaker underscore this as well. The included sample documents run
the gamut from cheese and humor to modern and professional. Bottom
line - yeah, Deke is selling his product - but he's also trying to maintain the
attention of students he's never met, and impart serious knowledge about
a complex program. I'd take him over 80% of my college professors any
day of the week, and am learning a ton with his approach.
One other ancillary benefit is that Deke imbues other non-Adobe lessons
too. I've written copy for years on a freelance basis, but have always
handed off my stuff in Word format. As a guy who's going to be writing
proposals 9 to 5 every day, and who is going to be responsible for getting
them into InDesign and printed respectably, I appreciated the little bits of
editing know-how as well. I haven't incorporated all of them yet (as
evidenced by my double spaces between sentences here...that's going to
take some time), but there's some very practical advice here also to be
gleaned from a guy who makes his living publishing books with this
particular program.
I love this product, and I'd give it six stars if I could. Buy it and you won't
be disappointed.
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