What exactly is an InDesign book template? It’s a blank InDesign document that has all the background work done for you. When you open a template, you’ll see an untitled document that’s already set up with InDesign preferences, trim size, margins, and styles. Our InDesign book template is a companion to Book Design Made Simple, the only book that guides you through every step of designing your own book using Adobe InDesign. We believe that anyone can learn to craft a well designed book, and now we’ve created an InDesign book template to get you started more quickly. In this article, we’ll exp ..read more

InDesign’s live index includes some great advanced features: you can add italics to the index, add bold page numbers for illustrations, and even create a live index across several documents using InDesign’s Book feature. Be sure to first read our earlier blog post, Create a live index in InDesign, to learn the basics of creating a live index. Many books contain Latin names or other words that will require italics in the index entries. Bold is preferred for index page numbers that indicate illustrations. And, if you’ve used InDesign’s Book feature for layout, you’ll want to create a live index ..read more

It’s easy to create a live index for your book in InDesign, and there’s a major benefit to doing so: If you move any of your text, the index markers stay with the text and the index automatically updates! In Book Design Made Simple, we explain how to create paragraph styles for indexes, how to import an index from Word, and how to typeset an index. Here, we’ll explain the simplest way to create a live index in InDesign. Adding first-level live index entries All indexes include first-level entries. These are the main entries placed in alphabetical order in the index. (Your index may or may not ..read more

Back when Fiona started Book Design Made Simple, she decided that writing in InDesign would be easiest. (After all, it was her native habitat.) And now one of our readers has admitted to doing the same. So we thought we’d explore the various reasons why anyone would want to write in a layout program. For us it worked perfectly. How about you? Reasons for writing in InDesign Our book is filled with over 200 InDesign screen shots, and most of the pages are a complicated mix of text and illustrations. A huge percentage of the illustrations were produced in the same application. So there are three ..read more

Book typesetting and layout tips are usually about the small stuff—fixing awkward hyphenation, using special characters for symbols, and so on—but most of the questions we get are about the BIG issues. How can I balance the number of text lines on facing pages? What if the last page of my chapter only has two lines? If my chapter has to end on a right-hand page, can I leave it blank? These issues arise all the time during book typesetting. We’ll explain the best ways to resolve them. Let’s assume you’ve imported your text into your InDesign document, autoflowed the text into your pages, and no ..read more

Combining serif and sans serif fonts successfully can be a challenge, but it’s much easier once you know a few simple rules. It’s worth learning, as combining two fonts can really make your book design look professional. So don’t be daunted by the thousands of fonts available! The font-combining basics explained here will help to get you going quickly and easily. When you’re experimenting with mixing fonts, you’ll see right away that some combinations work and others don’t. Below are some simple rules and examples you can use as a starting point. Choosing serif and sans serif fonts that combin ..read more

In early November, we all woke up to find Adobe Creative Cloud waiting to be updated. What—again? Well, it turns out that this update, CC 2017, does provide some InDesign enhancements that might help you work more effectively and improve your design. We’ll discuss the significant ones here. Blue highlighting This feature appeared earlier in the fall, and perhaps it’s been driving you crazy, so we’ll address it first. It’s the bright blue highlighting you might be seeing in your text and/or to the left of your text frame. Blue highlighting on the type itself indicates places where you’ve applie ..read more

If you’re importing a Word index into InDesign, chances are good that the index will import just fine. But what if you get the dreaded “index entries contain invalid characters” error? This happened to one of our readers recently. It’s a tricky issue to resolve since InDesign doesn’t specify which characters are invalid. With a Word index containing hundreds (or thousands!) of entries, how can you find the specific characters causing the issue?  Below I’ll explain the quickest and easiest way to resolve this issue. Here are the steps: Find invalid characters using Word and InDesign Fix the inv ..read more

What the heck is a text variable, anyway? It’s copy that you can add anywhere in your document—but it varies depending on the context. For instance, you could set up your document to automatically insert the current date in a header. Or if you need to send readers to the last page, a text variable will automatically update the page number reference if you add or delete pages later. Now think how useful text variables could be as navigational tools (i.e., running heads) in a nonfiction book. They can make the current chapter number and chapter title appear—presto!—on verso pages and the most re ..read more

The InDesign Book feature provides a great way to combine smaller InDesign files into one larger Book file. It’s easy to use, and you’ll find our step-by-step guide to using the Book feature here. But, after using the InDesign Book feature for Book Design Made Simple and numerous other book projects, we’ve discovered that it’s not perfect—so forewarned is forearmed! There are lots of things we love about the InDesign Book feature, but we’ve also discovered things along the way that didn’t work so well. Below we’ll tell you about the good, the bad, and the ugly—what worked and what didn’t—so th ..read more