Fan of creative technology, elearning, instructional design and a little geeky

InDesign: Spanning and splitting columns

April 13, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by Cari Jansen

If you’ve ever seen one of those bouncy balls that just don’t stop bouncing… that’s me… today April 13, 2010… The official launch day for Creative Suite 5 in the Asia Pacific region.

This new release is truly amazing…  it reduces design boundaries, helps you work faster and will most certainly be a critical facter in streamlining your workflows (ok, I know it… ‘workflow” … it’s a bit off-putting as a word… but wait till I show you some of what the updated apps can do!!! and you’ll know what I’m talking about).

To start of the new release celebration, let me take you through my most favourite application (InDesign) and most favourite new feature in InDesign: Spanning Columns.

Spanning and Splitting Columns

Well I have to admit this is my favourite new InDesign CS5 feature. I know there’s tons of other cool stuff. But until now you would have had to either break your text threads or use keep options and build lots of different text frames in order to change the layout of your text from say a single column to a double column view or vice versa. All those headlines you’ve cut out of stories and turned into separate frames? Nested frames with more columns with content etc? Your pain has come to an end with this new span and split column feature. Additionally this feature will benefit those of use building EPUBs in InDesign… because of the uninterrupted content flow it allows us to create. More about this later…

In the following video tutorial I demo how simple it is to build full articles on a page in a magazine/newspaper scenario, even better I include some of the CS4 features as well to show-case the absolute power of this new feature. 1+1 truly makes 10!!!

Video Tutorial

 

Adobe InDesign
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