Hi - How can I set up a book in Adobe Indesign? I have been using Quark XPress for a while now, but I've never done a book in any program and never used Indesign...and now I will be doing both for work. If this is too complicated a question for this forum, could you recommend a good online resource or book that could help me learn the basics of this program and how to set up a book? Thank you,

Alissa

Hi, Alissa. This is, indeed, a complicated question, since you're trying to learn two things at once:

1. how to use InDesign;
2. how to lay out and typeset (and possibly design?) a book.

There are many, many resources available on these topics, but most will tend to deal with one or the other.

If you're on a deadline, I recommend going for the highest-bandwidth connection possible: find someone else who knows how to do what you're trying to do (make sure they *really* know how to do it, though) and ask him or her to walk you through it, at a computer, in person. A human being can show you the quick and dirty basics faster than any book or video, and a person can answer in real time any questions that arise.

When/if you have time for self study, there are a lot of online and printed resources, many of them free. A good place to start is at the Adobe site, which has lots of tutorials in the "InDesign Design Center" (http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/designcenter/search.cfm?product=InDesign&go=Go) including

* Migrating from QuarkXPress to InDesign
* Setting up a new document
* Working with master pages
* Setting pagination
* Creating running headers and footers
* Creating a table of contents (though I think this feature is overkill for all but the most lengthy and complicated book projects)

You should also check out the "Learning Center" at the InDesign User Group website (http://www.indesignusergroup.com/learning_center/). There you'll find links to podcasts, tutorials, white papers, videos, all about how to use InDesign.

And About.com offers a free basic InDesign tutorial to familiarize you with the program (http://desktoppub.about.com/od/indesign/a/id_class.htm).

Layers Magazine has a free "Getting Started with InDesign CS" video online (http://www.layersmagazine.com/indesign-started.html), but it's from two versions ago, so some aspects may be slightly out of date. The instructions will probably still work, but there may be easier ways to do some things in CS3--or not; I haven't used the newest version yet, so I don't know.

Since you've used Quark before (though it's unclear from your post how well--is "a while now" a couple of months, or a couple of years?), you may know a fair amount about digital typesetting. I would still recommend, however, reading James Felici's "Complete Manual of Typography," which is a solid, practical book for digital typesetting in any application. And although it's not InDesign-specific, he does explain how to use some tools or options that are exclusive to InDesign.

Oops--I have to go to work now. But I hope this helps!

India
http://indiamos.wordpress.com/