In this week’s free InDesign Secrets movie, Anne-Marie Concepcion takes you from making the simplest InDesign drop cap, to creating more sophisticated options using character styles, anchored objects, and text wraps. She starts by showing you how to create the simplest three-line drop cap, similar to this example:

Next, she shows you how to apply a character style to make your first letter stand out in a different font or color.

During the movie, she also shows you some options for changing the size and position of your first letter so that it aligns just the way you want, yet remains fully editable and in flow with your document. Finally, Anne-Marie concludes by showing you a trick to wrap your text around the drop cap using an anchored object. It’s still a bit of a workaround, but it’s something Anne-Marie’s fans are frequently asking her about. Here, I’ve used it to make my text sidle up to my fancy W drop cap:

InDesign makes adding this bit of typographic interest fairly routine, and you can see it all in action from Anne-Marie in this week’s free tutorial:

Meanwhile, David Blatner (Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy) has a new exclusive video for lynda.com members all about making two-state buttons in interactive documents.

Both Anne-Marie’s and David’s fresh secrets take you from old-school text layout to new frontier interactivity this week. See you back here in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets!

Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series
• Courses by David Blatner on lynda.com
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• Creating Long Documents with InDesign
• InDesign Styles in Depth
• InDesign CS5: Interactive Documents and Presentations

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets movie, David Blatner shows you how to create running headers (or in this example, footers) that are automatically based on a variable you define. These footers are often used to help book readers get their bearings about which chapter, section, or subsection they might be reading. They’re also very handy and add a nice bit of navigational context for your readers, but let me tell you from my experience in book publishing, creating them can really be a quality-control project all by itself if you don’t use the right tools. For example, if the text upon which the running header or footer was created gets changed, or a new subhead is inserted during the editing cycle, the running footer information often gets separated from its parent text.

But as David demonstrates, telling InDesign that you want that footer to be based on a variable (for example, the last subhead that precedes it) means you never have to worry about updating the footer text if the subhead in question gets edited. You create these automatic running headers and footers by creating a text variable that basically tells InDesign: “Create this text based on the last subsection head you find and automatically plop it right here at the bottom of the right-hand page.” Once you learn InDesign’s language for doing this, your running headers or footers know what to do automatically. (The free tutorial video reveals a trick for getting InDesign to reflect your updated edits in the footer as well.)

Meanwhile, for members of lynda.com, David’s co-consipirator in InDesign secrecy, Anne-Marie Concepcion, has an exclusive video called Live Caption tips and tricks that discusses using InDesign’s Live Captions feature to automatically populate your caption fields with information directly from your image metadata.

You know, sometimes I’m wary of abdicating my work to the InDesign robots, but these two features are much better at overseeing tedious tasks in a consistent way than I am.

See you back here in two weeks with another InDesign Secrets tutorial from David and Anne-Marie.

Interested in more?
• Every movie from the InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series
• Courses by David Blatner on lynda.com
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• Creating Long Documents with InDesign
• InDesign Styles in Depth
• InDesign CS4: 10 Habits of Highly Effective Pros

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets movie, Anne-Marie Concepcion reveals the useful mysteries of compositional highlighting in InDesign. As exotic as compositional highlighting may sound, my guess is you’re quite familiar with the Substituted Fonts indicator that shows pink when your document has missing fonts, and not-so familiar with the four other highlights you can turn on to reveal potential problem areas in your document. As InDesign lists them in the Composition panel, these four lesser-know highlight options are:

Keep Violations—Lets you know where InDesign has had to violate any keep settings you’ve applied to your paragraphs (like “keep the heading with the next two body sentences”).

H&J Violations—Reveals wherever your hypenation or justification tolerances have been breached.

Custom Tracking/Kerning—Shows you where someone has hand-set kerning rather than rewriting text.

Substituted Glyphs—Reveals wherever you have used alternates for standard glyphs.

Each of these highlighting options are represented by a different color wherever they appear in your document. You can find them by opening the Preferences panel (Ctrl-K or ⌘-K), and then choosing the Composition panel where you can turn on the check boxes. Since InDesign automatically chooses what color will appear for each compositional highlight, and there’s no color-key to help you discern what color is designated to each highlight, I’ve taken the liberty of creating the following image to help you. (Note that Keep Violations occurs so rarely, not even an InDesign goddess like Anne-Marie could force one to happen, so I left that one color-free.)

Meanwhile, for lynda.com members we have an exclusive movie this week from Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner. While Anne-Marie is sharing a secret to whip your document into shape, David’s got the goods on managing your workspace with Managing your InDesign panels.

See you back in two weeks with two fresh secrets from Anne-Marie and David!

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets on lynda.com
• Courses by David Blatner on lynda.com
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• InDesign CS5.5 New Features
• InDesign Styles in Depth