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Posts Tagged ‘design’

Promotional image for blog post with title and Typefi logo on abstract blue background with black and white photo of Damian on the top right.

5 Automation tips when creating InDesign templates

Damian Gibbs
Solutions Consultant, Typefi

InDesign is a powerful design and production tool with a myriad of advanced features. Many of these features are accessed through repetitive manual clicking and keyboard shortcuts. Wouldn’t it be great to automate this tedium? Well, the good news is that you can!

By using improved setups of styles and panels that enable scripting, and by applying GREP (Global Regular Expression Print), it’s possible to save yourself from these endless repetitions. You’ll still be able to produce the same results, but the amount of effort you’ll need to put forth will be greatly reduced. In this post, Damian shares 5 automation tips to save you time when creating InDesign templates.

Promotional graphic with photo of Peter Kahrel, Typefi Senior Scripting Engineer, above a white logo for Typefi, and the title of the blog post.

Automate repetitive graphs and charts in InDesign with scripting

Peter Kahrel
Senior Scripting Engineer, Typefi

The adage ‘work smarter, not harder’ often comes to mind when composing documents. Thankfully, scripting can help save the day, as Typefi Senior Scripting Engineer, Peter Kahrel, explains.

Charts in Adobe InDesign are usually produced as separate files and placed in an InDesign document as images. These charts can be high-quality PDF or EPS files, but more often than not they are medium- to low-quality bitmaps.
Abstract image of overlaid bar charts and line graphs.

Many charts are also repetitive. For example, a financial data sheet that’s published every day or every week can contain one or more charts that are always the same apart from the height of bars (in a bar chart) or the way a line is drawn (in a line chart).

Promotional graphic with photo of Damian Gibbs, Typefi Solutions Consultant, above a black logo for Typefi, and the title of the blog post.

4 Top tips using InDesign Paragraph Styles

Damian Gibbs
Solutions Consultant, Typefi

When formatting documents, InDesign users regularly face challenges—many of which can be easily fixed with Paragraph Styles, if you know how to. From fixing formatting issues when importing Microsoft Word documents to combatting common typography issues, Damian Gibbs, Solutions Consultant at Typefi, shares his top tips using InDesign Paragraph Styles.

Female hands typing on the keyboard of a Mac laptop
Cover image for blog post 'The publishing machine'

The Publishing Machine: How automation makes space for creativity

Damian Gibbs
Solutions Consultant, Typefi

It is a curious thing, publishing books. I’ve never been sure if it is more art or science; either way, there is no doubt that both are involved, and one without the other amounts to naught.

Access to literature has come a long way since early handwritten manuscripts, thanks to moveable type and the printing press, largely attributed to Johannes Gutenberg. The “technology” Gutenberg leveraged was his own trade of blacksmithing. This is as far from being a scribe as you could imagine—metal versus paper, a loud, hot workshop versus the quiet library environment.

Stock photo of an antique printing press.
The printing press—an early industry disruptor!

It is unknown how or why Gutenberg formalised the concept of moveable type and the printing press, but it is an early example of “disruption” by someone “outside of the business”.