Do you ever wonder (or are you currently struggling with) how you can convert your trade books, journals, whitepapers, instruction manuals and such from a “designed for print/PDF” InDesign format to a digital eBook for the iPad bookstore, the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and other devices?  Then I think you’ll love this.
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I want you to know about upcoming seminars and webinars I’ll be doing or that I’m involved with, covering InDesign, Acrobat/PDF, and other goodies.

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InDesignSecretsLive! Seminars
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David Blatner (my partner in InDesignSecrets.com) and I have been enjoying doing one-day traveling seminars on InDesign around the country for the past year, with the main topic being “Tips and Techniques for Getting the Most Out of InDesign.”  We even made a web site just for our live events, with a page devoted to the traveling seminars:

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Adobe totally re-jiggered their User-to-User forums a few weeks ago, the public bulletin boards where thousands of end users help each other out with questions about Adobe programs.

Adobe Forums
http://forums.adobe.com
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The training side of Seneca Design & Training has been as busy as ever, even in the midst of all these projects. It's only due to the efforts of Sherri "Ms. Wonderful" Austin, Seneca's Training Coordinator, and our top-flight crew of Associate Geek trainers, that we've been able to keep up; and I've been able to complete at least some of the projects I've been talking about.

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So you think you know your design jargon? Check out this neat Flash game I found on the web:

Find the 25 Design Terms
http://www.collemcvoy.com/findthe25designterms/

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My first Lynda.com video training title went live a couple weeks ago. Right now the lessons are only available online, but a DVD will be available for sale shortly:

InCopy CS3 + InDesign CS3 Integration
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=323

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I'm not a sports fan … It took the fact that my hometown Bears were in the Super Bowl this past weekend for me to look up which network was broadcasting the game and remember to turn it on. Even then, I just had the game on in the background while I was puttering around the house doing other things.

The main thing I was interested in — other than if we won or not — were the commercials. When I heard the roar of the crowd die off I'd glance at the television to catch the score and see if a run of commercials was about to start.

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Are you and your editorial colleagues curious if InCopy could help streamline things at your workplace, but not sure how it actually works?

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Late last year I announced in DesignGeek that David Blatner (my co-author for InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs) and I were starting our own podcast called InDesign Secrets:
http://www.indesignsecrets.com

So here it is a couple months later, a half-dozen episodes under our belts, and let me tell you it's going great! What a blast! I never knew it'd be so much fun to do this, nor did I realize how much other people might enjoy hearing us go back and forth on cool InDesign tips and tricks. (We've received a ton of e-mail feedback, and often answer user questions "on the air.").

I think what makes our podcast so lively is that there's two of us, and the fun we have talking about InDesign together comes through loud and clear. There's a lot of laughter and good-natured teasing. We don't take ourselves too seriously, but there's very little fluff. We jump right in to the content of the secrets we want to share in each episode and thoroughly cover a bunch of topics, one right after the other. more >

So often on any of the design- or prepress-related listservs and forums I participate in, when someone posts a question, someone else answers, "You could probably script this," especially if the questioner is using a Mac. It can get quite aggravating after awhile.

AppleScript is purportedly so easy for normal people (non-programmers) to learn, it sometimes feels like software developers leave off features on purpose, knowing that the user can write a script for it if they really want it. And I am so jealous of those that know how to do this … I've never been able to get AppleScript to sink in my poor brain, though I've sat down with tutorials more than twice.

Tiger's Automator is supposed to help end users figure out AppleScripting, and it already has many adherents, especially among left-brained designers. For example, the top download on the Automator World web site is Photoshop CS Automator Actions (a CS2 version is also available):
http://www.automatorworld.com/?p=56more >