Constructing a long document is far easier when you have a good foundation! But you don’t necessarily have to create that foundation yourself. Learn where to find InDesign templates, how to customize them properly, and which features are critical to get right before you begin laying out your pages.

Topics include:

• Understanding Parent (Master) Pages hierarchies
• When and how to use Primary Text Frames
• Setting up workspaces, sections, and page numbering for success
• What to look for in a quality template
• Ensuring your margins, columns, and document settings are correct

10 out of 10 InDesign professionals agree: You cannot be efficient unless you master the use of paragraph and character styles. In this deep dive, we’ll explore the most powerful (but often misunderstood) aspects of styles, with a focus on “how-to” techniques that are vital for creating and editing long documents.

Topics include:

• Creating, naming, and organizing styles for consistent results
• Nested and GREP styles: When to use each and why they’re both amazing
• How to make text import from MS Word a breeze
• Magic scripts that create styles on-the-fly
• Using styles to create cross references, object styles, text variables, and more

Whether you’re building a book, manual, proposal, or any other kind of long document, you’ll inevitably spend a ton of time cleaning up other people’s messes—wrong formatting, wrong styles, corrupted documents, inconsistent text, and more. In this session, you’ll learn how to speed up this work, using scripts and power-user features. And, as Mary Poppins said, “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun; you find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

Topics include:

• Find/Change power user tips and tricks
• Troubleshooting corrupt or problematic MS Word files
• Removing bad text formatting while maintaining the styles you want
• What to do with embedded or problem images
• Automating cleanup with free and easy scripts

The longer your document, the more you need to consider how you’re going to put it all together. Should you use the book panel or not? What if you need to assemble a wide variety of external documents and images? Join us for an in-depth exploration of constructing long documents, by a master who has created publications everywhere from 1 to 20,000 pages.

Topics include:

• Book panel pros and cons
• Best practices for laying out a book cover
• Managing chapter openers the easy way
• Ensuring style and numbering consistency across multiple documents
• Compiling PDFs, scans, photos, and other supplementary materials

InDesign has a number of features that are used almost exclusively with long documents, and which require special instruction. Join us for this fast-paced exploration of several long-doc features, including tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, endnotes, and more!

Topics include:

• Practical tips for building one or more tables of contents (TOCs) in your documents
• When to use InDesign’s built-in indexing feature vs a third-party script
• Must-have scripts for managing endnotes (and sidenotes!)
• Managing difficult footnotes
• How InDesign’s editorial tools, such as Track Changes and Notes, help you manage your publications

No matter how much work you’ve put into your document, it all comes down to one thing: Can you export or print it properly? This session will cover the most important (but rarely discussed) practices for getting the best export or print possible, whether you’re creating a PDF, an EPUB, or going direct to print.

Topics include:

• Greenlighting your document: checking preflight, ink manager, fonts, and links
• Making a great print-ready PDF for commercial or print-on-demand publishing
• Why “hybrid” PDFs are so powerful (and easy to make)
• Understanding fixed-layout vs reflowable EPUB