An introduction tailored for InDesign innocents, Beginners InDesign teaches a lay layout person all they could need to produce professional publications ready for print or PDF. BONUS PLUS! A bluffers guide to graphic design terms and principles!

The InDesign Workspace

• About Workspaces
• Control
• Tools
• Panels
• Keyboards and Menus
• Undo and Revert
• Navigation

Setting up publications

• Page Sizes
• Guides and grids
• About Objects and Frames
• Inserting and deleting pages
• About Layers
• Colours
  • Swatches
  • Spot
  • Process
  • Gradients
  • Sharing Swatches
  • Default Swatches
  • Eyedropper Colours
• Understanding defaults and preferences

Laying out pages

• Adding frames
• Working with frames
• Fills and Stokes
• Adjusting corners
• Using the Pathfinder panel
• Frame content
  • Text
  • Graphics
  • Shapes
• Using the Align panel

Working with Type

• Creating text frames
• Text Frame Options
• Importing copy
• Text flow
• Story Editor
• Autoflow
• Typography
• Fonts
• Glyphs
• Find/Change

Graphics

• Why resolution matters
• Which formats
• Importing imagres
• Fitting images into frames
• Using Gridify to speed page layout
• Links panel
• Transparency Effects
• Text Wrap

Working with Tables

• About tables
• Creating tables
• Importing tables
• Formatting tables

Workflow: Styles and Master Pages

• Character styles and paragraph styles
  • Paragraph alignment
  • Hyphenation
  • Spelling
  • Rules Above and Below
  • Bullets and Lists
• Object styles
• Master Pages
  • Page Numbering
  • Working with Master page items

Output

• Preflighting your publication
• Preparing for print
• Creating PDF’s
• Packaging and archiving