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General discussion

Training for CS4 on Mac?

Nov 30, 2010 5:05AM PST

I need to get training on how to use Indesign CS4 on a Mac, but most of the training materials I have seen focus on setting up magazines and newsletters. I am a book publisher, and would like to start using InDesign for book layout. I don't have the time to wade through a lot of crap about setting up magazines or newspapers. I just want to know how to set up book layouts (i.e., create left and right master pages, TOCs, indexes, etc.) I don't even need to know how to deal with color-simple B&W text all the time. At one time I used FrameMaker, but they don't make that for the Mac, and I'm in a total Mac shop now.

Anyone here know a resource for this?

(If it's of help, I'm using Intel Macs running OS X 10.6.5, and no, I don't want to run Parallels or Fusion and put MS Windows on my machine. Tried it and it's a big PITA.)

Discussion is locked

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I looked around on google
Nov 30, 2010 5:18AM PST

And while folks are moving to CS5 there are some online CS4 tutorials.

If you don't have the time to do the wading, then why not call up Adobe and ask what company is doing training in your area?

I remember FrameMaker and can see where a book maker would love it.
Bob

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Yes, FrameMaker was great
Nov 30, 2010 6:09AM PST

And I thought I'd be able to slide easily into InDesign, but noooooo... seems a lot of the concepts, or maybe just the names for things, are different. Anyhoo, I'm lost when I try to play around with InDesign. I taught myself FrameMaker (and if you have used it you know how un-intuitive it is) but InDesign seems worse.

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I agree.
Nov 30, 2010 7:30AM PST

If I may diverge, we had such deep issues with Frame that we finally found ways to make it bend without breaking. We would input in text (notepad at times), Word for most of us then heave the whole work over to our Frame guru to whip into the Frame doc. This didn't sit well with one of our managers who pulled the plug on Word, demanded we all use Frame (chaching for Frame's owners) and document production hit a new low. Then we heard that this was all our fault.

But I digress.

I've found the Adobe products to be ones I have to make a list of what I need to do then tackle it item by item.

Eventually you'll develop a repertoire for each task.
Bob

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Good grief!
Nov 30, 2010 8:44AM PST

A manager who insisted on that must have had holes in his brain pan. Anyone who has worked in the industry for a while will tell you that Frame is for LAYOUT, not composing or editing. Sadly, I worked at a location once where it was the other way around: the documentation dept head refused to spring for decent layout software, and we were stuck with using an old version of word for composing and laying out 400- and 500-page tech manuals loaded with charts and screen shots. Word chokes on stuff like that, and we regularly had to rebuild documents. But I guess out hourly time cost them less than purchasing six copies of FrameMaker.

There's a happy medium in there somewhere. I just wish that, when I did have a document that was pretty close to the way it needed to be formatted already, I could have successfully imported it into Frame and kept the formatting. Just didn't seem to work very well.

I did find some CS4 InDesign training stuff, by the way, so I paid for it and I'll be working my way through it. We'll see how it goes.

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Sorry but this just came back to me.
Dec 1, 2010 4:21AM PST
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Search for "InDesign online tutorial"
Mar 9, 2011 3:26PM PST

You can try doing a search using the keywords "InDesign online tutorial".