Adobe InDesign Introduction and Intermediate

Course Overview

This 2 day course is ideal for those who have little or no experience using Adobe InDesign and who need to learn the basic skills that are necessary to begin using the program effectively.

At the end of the course the students will be able to familiar with the InDesign working environment and will be able to confidently begin creating new, or modifying existing InDesign documents.

Introducing InDesign

• An introduction to InDesign and its features
• A tour around the work area
• The toolbox
• Palettes
• Opening files
• Navigation techniques
• Saving and closing files and file export

Setting Up a New Document

• Document creation
• Working with Guides
• Grids and Master pages

Shapes, Frames and Placeholders

• Drawing and editing shapes, frames and placeholders
• Filling objects with colour and gradients
• Stroking shapes and lines,
• Creating text and graphic frames and transforming objects
• Using the Pen tool to create and edit free-form shapes

Textual Content

•  Creating text frames
• Entering and placing text and special characters
• Text editing
• Specifying text frame options
• Using Find/Change and the Spell checker

Formatting Text

• Using the character and paragraph palettes to format text
• Using tabs, leaders and indents, drop caps and optical margin alignment

Working With Styles

• Defining and applying character and paragraph styles
• Removing styles from selected tex
• Assigning keyboard shortcuts
• Nested styles
• Importing and deleting styles

Working With Images

• Adding images
• Modifying graphic frames and their contents
• Creating in-line frames
• Wrapping text around objects
• Managing links

Layers

• Using layers to group and separate objects
• Working with the layers palette
• Creating layers
• Moving and copying objects between layers
• Merging and deleting layers

Special Effects

• Creating and handling transparency
• Using feathering
• Drop shadows and adding corner effects to frames

Tables

• Creating tables and adding content
• Inserting and deleting rows and columns
• Making selections in tables
• Formatting tables
• Breaking tables across frames
• Adding strokes and fills

Object Libraries 

• Working with an object library
• Changing the library display
• Cataloging objects

Preflighting, Packaging And Printing

• Using the preflight command and options to check the integrity of a document
• Using the package command and the print menu