Adobe InDesign CS6
By Laura A. Ewald
Spring 2012 By now, most indexers will have heard of InDesign and embedded indexing. But if you are like I was, you don’t know enough to consider whether or not it is something you should attempt. Now, thanks to Judith McConville’s presentation at the Spring Heartland Chapter meeting, I know a lot more than I did and have a much better idea of what it would take to pursue embedded indexing with InDesign. Issues to consider InDesign is Adobe’s latest and greatest professional design and layout tool for producing high quality documents for print and on-screen delivery. It seems to be moving quickly through the publishing world, replacing Adobe’s PageMaker and Quark Software’s QuarkXpress as the program of choice for e-books and e-book indexes. The good:
The bad:
What you’ll need:
Bottom line:
Potential for indexing in InDesign Judith McConville described InDesign as a good product, but one that is, in terms of indexing, best suited for catalogs. It is not really good for what indexers usually do with indexing software: complex headings and subheadings, bold or italicized locators, conceptual indexing, multiple-authored books, etc. Judith did a demonstration of the software using a sample book file, and it was clear to me that this is a very complex software that is very good at its main function—design and layout—but very confusing to use for indexing. Still, the publishing industry is changing rapidly, and embedded indexing seems to be the wave of the future, so InDesign is a valuable tool to know. Here’s hoping the Digital Trends Task Force can help make it more fully functional for indexing. © 2012 by Heartland Chapter of ASI. All rights reserved. |