Cari Jansen

Stepping into the Adobe Creative Cloud…

Cari Jansen — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:35:18 +0000

On Monday Adobe officially announced Adobe Creative Suite 6 and Adobe Creative Cloud. A lot has already been written about new features in InDesign CS6, Photoshop CS6, Illustrator CS6 etc. and I will add blog-posts about various applications and features over time. But what I’m truly excited about is what the Creative Cloud brings to the table. The Creative Cloud...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

New InDesign Extension – Find/Change Attributes

Cari Jansen — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:43:20 +0000

The Find/Change Attributes extension allows you to load formatting attributes from selected text into InDesign's Find/Change dialog box. That's a handy feature to have for a range of production scenarios, but for me in particular it's something I use a lot when cleaning up supplied InDesign files prior to EPUB conversion.

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Out of the shadow into the limelight: Adobe Shadow

Cari Jansen — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:17:12 +0000

Adobe yesterday released some seriously cool technology on its Adobe Labs: Adobe Shadow 1.0. Shadow allows front-end web developers/designers to preview websites across different devices. As I’m in the process of making my web-site device responsive, I’m loving Shadow It’s super easy to install: Download Shadow release from Adobe Labs and install it. Download the Google Chrome browser extension and install...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

My guest-blogpost about (blank) Paragraph Returns

Cari Jansen — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 07:16:57 +0000

It’s been a very busy start to the new year. Working on great electronic publishing projects and transitions with clients… has meant I’ve had little or no time to write some blog-posts. I thought I’d start the year off with a guest blog-post over at InDesign Secrets. Today’s post is inspired by Liz Castro, who writes lovely articles on her...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Building EBooks with InDesign – Forced Line Breaks

Cari Jansen — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:18:15 +0000

Org. posted 1-Jan-2012, Updated 3-Jan-2012 / Postscript added One of the pitfalls of converting print publications to EBooks, is that designers often use forced line breaks (Shift+Return/Enter) in print-layouts to control where headings and even paragraph lines are broken. Doing so can cause problems when the same document is also converted to EPUB later on. Problems can occur when we...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Tomaxxi’s Script: Renaming images from within InDesign

Cari Jansen — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:17:12 +0000

Some time ago Tomaxxi (Marijan Tompa) wrote a small script that allows you to rename images from within InDesign. You might wonder why you’d want to use a script like this? Well, I actually found myself using it this morning as part of an EPUB production process. I’d received client-supplied print artwork in InDesign, and the Links used in the...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Figures in InDesign CS5.5 and Accessibility

Cari Jansen — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:41:04 +0000

After reading David’s blog-post on InDesign Secrets, titled “Building an Org Chart or Flowchart in InDesign“. I thought… “How does building illustrations in InDesign impact the development of Accessible PDF with InDesign CS5.5?” InDesign CS5.5 introduced significant new features for EPUB/HTML and PDF export. Building Accessible PDFs is now much, MUCH easier… It’s not yet perfect and we’ll still need...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

InDesign CS5.5 7.5.2 Update fixes EPUB issues

Cari Jansen — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:00:43 +0000

Amongst a list of issues that’s been resolved with today’s Adobe InDesign CS5.5 7.5.2 update release are a couple of EPUB issues. Notably: An issue in the DOCTYPE of the EPUB, where InDesign would insert an extra space, which in turn caused iBooks to return an error and stop rendering the EPUB. The iBooks rendering issue when ; (soft-hyphen) characters appear...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Back to the Basics with Perth IDUG

Cari Jansen — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 02:36:33 +0000

The upcoming Perth InDesign User Group meeting, October 5, is the 3rd anniversary of the user group. We will take you back to the basics during this meet… The IDUG meetings are a great way of meeting other InDesign users from in and around Perth. Membership’s absolutely free, and you can even grab a cool drink and a slice of...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

InDesign Secrets: creative Place and Story Linking

Cari Jansen — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:46:55 +0000

InDesign CS5.5 introduces a new feature called Linked Stories. I’ve just posted a contributor blog-post on InDesign Secrets that gives one example of how you could use this new feature.

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Creating PNGs from Illustrator

Cari Jansen — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:22:38 +0000

We all get this question as designers: “Can you provide us with a copy of the logo or masterhead design in a format that we can use in Microsoft Word”… or “PowerPoint”? Illustrator CS, released back in 2003, introduced the Save for Microsoft Office command. (File menu), which converts your Illustrator artwork to a 150ppi Portable Network Graphic (.png). Funnily...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

EPUB Export & Relative to Page Size

Cari Jansen — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:30:29 +0000

Updated 7 June 2011 (added additional notes ). One of the new InDesign CS5.5′s EPUB Export Option features is the ability to control whether images are exported with Fixed width or Relative to Page Size setting. In this blog-post I’m running through a few findings. I’m only looking at the Fixed / Relative to Page Size settings in this blog-post,...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

InDesign Character Styles & EPUB

Cari Jansen — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:45:45 +0000

I’ve been head deep into EPUB… and wanted to share another finding with InDesign CS5.5. A short post only, because I’m in the middle of work InDesign CS5.5 now recognises character styles that are applied through nested styles and GREP styles during EPUB export. That’s very cool! It adds a span tag with class references to the style names by...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

Multi-Find/Change 1.02 Released

Cari Jansen — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:14:02 +0000

Martinho da Gloria (www.automatication.com), this week released the 1.02 update for the Mulit-Find/Change plug-in he developed for InDesign. About this plug-in Whether it’s to fix common formatting issues in manuscripts you import in InDesign for book and EBook publishing, such as removal of double tabs, spaces, paragraph returns, conversion of hyphens to en or em-dashes. Or to apply paragraph/character styles...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking

InDesign CS5.5 Lists & EPUB.

Cari Jansen — Mon, 09 May 2011 21:16:01 +0000

Updated 10-May-2011 (added alternate option, thanks to Bob’s comment) Publishers quite often generate multiple paragraph styles for bulleted and numbered lists behaviour. For instance the first or last bullet point in a list might have slightly different space before and after settings applied to it. I’ve been working on demo materials for the upcoming Print and ePublishing conference and was using...read more →

Cari Jansen - Training, Print & Electronic Publishing Consultancy, Technical Writing/Editing, Public Speaking