inDesign: It's Not Hard; It's Tedious

Besides going shopping at the local food co-op, I spent the day moving text and files to a new inDesign template. My reason for moving everything? The reason is that I screwed up the margins in my first template so badly that I couldn’t figure out how to straighten them out. I spent an hour cursing inDesign, even though I secretly knew that I created the problem myself. In the end I decided to create a new book template with the correct margins and pour all of the text and images into it.

That was a great idea, but I couldn’t find a way to “pour” one file into another like old wine into a new bottle. When I admitted to myself that my knowledge of inDesign was minimal, I started copying one object at a time from the original messed up document to the new template. This method works, but it’s slow. That’s me all over: working, but slow.

Here’s dusk as I sometimes see it from my backyard.

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inDesign Transparent Text Boxes to the Rescue

I want some of my children’s picture book images to fill the 8x8-inch page. My problem is that I didn’t take into account that I would be putting text over the images and now I have to squeeze the text in somehow. I’ve tried to make the text readable on dark backgrounds by giving the the characters a 6-pixel white stroke, but it looks really amateurish. Today I read enough of the inDesign documentation to learn how to set a paragraph’s background color, and how to outline the paragraph with a stroke. By setting the background transparency to about 80% I can place the text frame into most images without obscuring important details. A one-pixel black stroke keeps the white background from bleeding into any light areas in the image.

To set the inset (padding) for the paragraph, select the text frame using Command-B* to open the Text Frame Options box. I using an inset of 0p8 (8 points). In the Paragraph Properties box I’m choosing the beveled corners and a black stroke.

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What the page looks like in inDesign.

In the exported PDF, everything beyond the trim line has been removed. There’s a .25 inch margin on the left (inner) margin where the page will be attached to the spine. I think this looks good, better than putting a heavy white stroke on the text.

What the page looks like in the exported PDF. The .25 inch margin shows up on the left.

• The Mac “command” key is the equivalent of the Windows “control” key.

Bleed Lines and Trim Lines for My Children's Picture Book

I spent the day learning the basics of setting up a print book. I’ve been avoiding thinking about this, but the time has come to face the music. Ingramspark provides a detailed File Creation Guide PDF that lays out the requirements for an acceptable submission. My pages are going to be 8-inches by 8-inches. The Guide explains that images that fill the page from border to border must extend more than .125 inches beyond the 8x8-inch square on all sides side. In other words, the image must overflow the page by .125 inches. In addition, the inner side of the page — the side that’s fastened to the binding — must have a .25in margin.

Here’s an example that shows the bleed lines for a full page image. Everything outside of the trim size will be removed. When exporting the book to PDF for actual publishing, I will turn off all of the guidelines and color samples.

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Pitter patter! Let's get at her!

Today I decided to get back on track, fixing one problem at a time. Today I worked on fixing the broken links to images that I’ve moved since I originally placed them into the inDesign document. I moved some of the images and inDesign reports a warning when I load the document. In the Window -> Links panel there’s a list of all linked images. The broken links have a red tag. I tracked down original PSD files for the missing images and exported them again.

The image showing Buddy straddling the chimney is a 7.7 MB file, which is probably larger than necessary. I’ve read that uploading any eBook to Amazon over 5 MB incurs extra charges for each MB. My project weighs in a at a hefty 58 MB.

Picture sizes for eBooks revisited

There’s a lot of contradictory advice on the Web about the best sizes for eBook images. The general thought is that they should be about two times the dimensions of the device. When I read this I panicked because some of my images are defintely low-res. I created them in a hurry to get something going with inDesign and I never returned to up the resolution. And in my hurry, I’ve actually misplaced a few that need fixing. It’s true: Haste makes waste.

So, today I opened inDesign and thought, “These images aren’t actually embedded in this document — the images I see are actually linked to images somewhere on the file system. How can I find the actual images to check their size?” I did a web search with DuckDuckGo.com (the Duck doesn’t track me) for “indesign show links to embedded files” and found this Adobe resource: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/graphics-links.html. I then followed the instructions and found this screen, showing all of the source files for the images in my book. Now I can track them down and resize them if necessary.

The missing files have a red mark next to them. I’ll have to find those images…wherever they may be.

Going Beyond a Simple eBook

When I started this project, the idea of creating a real paper book and an eBook was more than I wanted to deal with. I thought that I should just do an eBook and get something published as soon as possible. I believed that I had good reason to be hasty. For one thing, I had to learn how to draw…and paint…and use Photoshop…and Procreate…and learn color theory, and everything else that goes with starting a career as an illustrator. Yes, I consider myself an illustrator, an illustrator just starting out.

After watching the process of other children’s book illustrators, I got to thinking that, to be taken seriously, I have to publish an actual paper version of my book as well as an eBook. Even though a paper book has mean special considerations than seem complicated, I have to face them. There’s the front matter, title page, cover images — all every exciting features that contribute to the professional “feel” of a book. I want my book to have that feel.

Today I created a second inDesign project for the paper version. The main change is that the paper book will be in portrait mode, not landscape mode. I’ll have to redesign the layout of images and text, and even create images that cover two pages. This is exciting stuff!

Here’s a view of the some ideas I have for the first few pages of front matter as they would look in portrait mode.

Continuity troubles

Now that I’m working in Kindle Create, I’m able to distance myself a little from my precious art and look at the book as a reader might look at it. And I see many annoying continuity problems that I missed while I was making the pictures.

In some cases I didn’t paint Momma’s shoes the right color; Buddy’s shoes are white instead of his signature red; Jimmy’s arm should be blue and his shoes should be cyan. In one drawing, I forgot to turn on the linework layer and the image is just a blur of colors. As for the text, the fonts are screwed up — the text font is supposed to be Goudy Old Style, but in some places it’s Minion, inDesign’s default font. These little details all add up to a sloppy mess that I have to fix before I can move on to the next step, publishing.

Here’s an example of missing colors.

An expanded image with overlaid text

One problem leads to another. By expanding the picture to fill the whole page, I now have the problem of how to display the text against a textured background. InDesign has a billion options. I’ll have to do some experimentation to see how to make a decent text block. I’ll look at this as an opportunity to learn more about inDesign.

The inDesign guidelines will be gone in the final version.

Changing the layout of the inDesign book template

With my images of various sizes I figure that I can change the margins of the inDesign template to get enough wiggle room for most of the pictures to look pretty good. Doing a little nudging and tweaking is preferable to redrawing the misfit images. I reduced the margins from 20 mm to 5 mm for the e-book template. I had to google “change margins for all indesign pages” to learn that I go to File -> Adjust Layout. I like the skinny little margins. I might even change them to 0 mm to bleed to the edge of the screen. I’m basing my margins on what I see in the Kindle Cread preview app. I’m hoping that the preview shows what readers will actually see on their devices!

Going through my rough draft tonight I got a feeling of a good feeling…satisfaction. It was great to see all of the pictures and all of the text laid out. I still have some work to do on both the images and text, but I’m pleased with what I see.

Layout problems as a result of no planning for image dimensions

Now that I’m doing the layout with text and images, my casual approach to image size and proportion is coming back to bite me. Here’s an example of an image that’s not the right dimensions. This particular image should be wide enough to fill the page, and it should have a comfortable place for the text, or it should be narrower. When I sketched these drawings months ago, I should have given a little more thought the overall design of the page. Oh, well. Hindsight is 20/20. Next time I’ll do it right.