Missed a story or two of Gurus Unleashed’s 24/7 coverage? Catch up with these important events and stories that happened in the world of InDesign.

Features

Considering–or struggling after–a move from QuarkXPress to InDesign CS4? This month Adobe released the 58-page free ebook Adobe InDesign CS4 Conversion Guide, A Hands-on Resource for Switching from QuarkXPress to InDesign CS4.

If you’re considering migrating to InDesign or just upgrading from a previous version, Adobe has a deal for you. Until 30 April, 2009. Order by then to save $200 USD on upgrades.

Ever wondered about FM or stochastic screening? InDesignSecrets.com provides a short and sweet introduction to using FM screening and hexachrome colors to add pizzazz to a printed piece. The article also points to an “Ask: Designorati” article from 2006 containing a more detailed discussion of hexachrome and how to create hexachrome images in Photoshop–which can then be placed into InDesign.

InDesign pranks sure to have your co-workers scratching their heads.

Terry White highlights the features of InDesign CS4 that can really save you time during layout. On a related note, Pfeiffer Consulting conducted a study that proved InDesign CS4’s Live Preflight feature increases productivity. If you’d like to get your hands on the complete Pfeiffer benchmarking report, which covers most of Creative Suite 4 including InDesign, you can download the 1.5MB PDF directly.

And, if you’d like to learn more about the Preflight panel, watch these great QuickTime movies prepared by Neil Oliver at CreativeMentor.com.

Anne-Marie Concepcion is asking for your help in beta testing a new plug-in she developed along with Peter Truskier and Jim Birkenseer. The plug-in is called InVersion, and it’s a tiny utility with one very ambitious function–it allows you to save and restore versions of each story in a publication. So far, InVersion only works with InDesign CS3 and/or InCopy CS3, so would-be beta testers should be using one or the other or both. A version for CS4 is in the works, but is awaiting the results of the CS3-compatible version beta testing.

Claudia McCue hands down the Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Use Registration.

“What Are Those Brackets in the Pages Panel?”

Bob Levine alerts us to a serious issue with the CS4 Packaging feature inwhich certain files may not be included in the package. Bob’s warning harkens back to the issue Ted LoCascio discovered in January.

MOGO Media announces the InDesign Seminar Tour.

Adobe updates several InDesign Help file topics, including new discussion of error messages.

At the same time, Adobe, whose User to User forums have been widely criticized for years, announces that it will completely revamp them.

Bob Bringhurst offers his personal service to convert your CS4 InDesign documents back to CS2 for compatibility with vendors, clients, and collaborators who haven’t yet upgraded.

How-To

Endnotes in InDesign and InCopy! Yahoo! Bob Bringhurst, the lead writer for InDesign and InCopy, created a technique to workaround the fact that InDesign and InCopy have footnotes but not endnotes, and to create real endnotes. As long as you have CS4, the technique is elegant and ingenius, and it answers a long-time need for layout designers and copywriters. In fact, Bob’s method is so useful that David Blatner had to make sure his readers knew about it, too. And boy were they grateful! Just check out the comments to David’s summary of, and pointer to, Bob’s original blog post.

GREP was definitely a big buzzword during March 2009. InDesign CS4’s Find/Change dialog includes the ability to search using GREP, a standard search and replace language common to many applications and the Web. What makes the GREP feature truly powerful is not that you can replace all instances of “gray” and “grey” with “50% black” using a single search string. Nay, what makes GREP the most powerful document management and design feature introduced to InDesign since Object Styles is the fact that you can search for, and change, anything with GREP–local text formatting, paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, table styles, and so on. With one search you could, for instance, replace all acronyms and sequential initials with more elegant small caps. Or perhaps you’d use GREP to format every anchored image to include a key line, change its location on the page to be relative to the location of the spine, and increase the text wrap outset.

Nearly anything you can imagine is possible with CS4’s GREP, and, fortunately, March saw the publication of many resources to help you use it.

First, AJ Wood’s video shows you how the inclusion of GREP styles amidst the options of paragraph styles can be used to format and alter text automatically and even as you type. Note: I’ve noticed that, after an introductory advertisement for Layers Magazine, layersmagazine.com usually fails to load AJ’s GREP Style presentation. However, if the intro ad is not for Layers Magazine, the video should loadas expected. The solution is to hit Reload/Refresh in your browser until the correct video loads.

If video learning isn’t your thing, or you’d just like to have something black and white to refer to after the video, don’t miss Mike Rankin’s “Adventures in GREPland.”

As hinted at by my example above, converting text to lowercase using GREP is easy, too.

David and Anne-Marie also discussed GREP Style (for non-GREPpers) in episode 99 of the InDesignSecrets Pocast.

GREP isn’t the only thing being discussed in March–not by a long shot.

Cari Jansen continues her excellent series, “Creating Interactive PDFs from InDesign,” wherein she reveals advanced techniques for creating truly interactive PDFs with features like rollover buttons, content that dynamically appears or disappears, PDF bookmarks, and much more. Catch up on the entire series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Bob Bringhurst weighs in on the related topic of exporting interactive Flash SWFs from InDesign and some of the nitty gritty details on CS4 changes to bookmarks and text anchors.

With a touch of O.C.D. Mike Rankin explains how to fix almost invisible, minor defects in the angles or rotations of rules and frames and make them perfectly straight.

How to split a multi-page PDF into several single-page PDFs for imposition and output.

Layers Magazine dissects ligatures.

Another hot topic in March is the use of paragraph rules for decorative and functional background coloring of blocks of text. Creative Curio includes a two-parter on using paragraph rules to offset headings (Part 1 and Part 2), while James Fritz uses paragraph rules to highlight an entire paragraph.

Quick Tips

The Graphic Mac offers quick tips on setting default fonts and colors, how to copy color swatches from one InDesign document into another, exiting text edit mode when switching tools. In addition to Jame’s tip, you can also simply press ESC and never have to reach for your mouse.

Joining two or more tables into one.

Video: “Resizing Text with a Keyboard Shortcut“.

“Clear the Color in a Character Style Back to Ignore” by David Blatner.

Video: How to place a specific page of a multi-page PDF into InDesign.

Video: Shortcuts for working with frames in InDesign.

Relink folders full of one image type to another image type.