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Adobe InDesign Basics Detailed Outline
All the InDesign Lessons and Tutorials in the Basics Course

From Elisabetta Bruno & Jacci Howard Bear, About.com Guest

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This outline of the Adobe InDesign Basics Class links to the lesson profiles and individual tutorials in each lesson as they are put online.
  1. The Work Area

  2. How to Set Up a Document
    1. The Document Area
    2. Setting Up the Page
    3. Setting Margins, Columns, and Grids
    4. Master Pages in InDesign

  3. Working With Colour
    1. Colour Palette
    2. Swatches Palette
    3. Gradient Palette

  4. The Tools, Part 1
    1. The Tools: Selection, Type, Line Drawing Tools
    2. The Tools: Frame and Shape Tools

  5. The Tools, Part 2
    1. The Tools: Transform Tools
    2. The Tools: Eyedropper and Measure Tool
    3. The Tools: Gradient Tool and Gradient Palette
    4. The Tools: Button Tool
    5. The Tools: Scissors Tool
    6. The Tools: Hand Tool
    7. The Tools: Zoom Tool

  6. Text & Paragraphs, Part 1
    • Placeholder Text
    • Text Frames and Text Threads
      • Automatic & Not-Really-Automatic Threading
      • The Not-Really-Automatic Method
      • The Automatic Method
    • Control Palette & Type Tool, Good Co-Workers
      • Let's Study Some Typography
    • The Character Palette
    • The Paragraph Palette
      • Text Composition
      • The Paragraph Palette – Hands On!
      • Paragraph Rules

  7. Text & Paragraphs, Part 2
    • An overview of InDesign's Typography Capabilities
    • Style Sheets
      • Character Styles
      • Paragraph Styles
        • Nested Styles

  8. Text & Paragraph, Part 3
    • Embellishment and Fine-Tuning
    • Text Acquisition
      • Importing Text from Word Documents
      • Importing Excel Documents
    • Useful Typographical Tricks and Aids
      • Spell Check
      • Changing Case
      • Find and Change Option
      • Glyphs
      • Creating Outlines from Text
    • Handling Missing Fonts

  9. Graphics and Images
    • More on resizing
    • Text and Graphics (text wrap)
    • Graphics Formats that Can Be Imported in InDesign
    • Handling of Adobe Illustrator (.ai) and Photoshop (.psd) Files in InDesign
    • How to Add Colour to Grayscale TIF images
    • Previews of Images in InDesign
    • Clipping Paths
    • Frames and Borders
    • The Transparency Palette

  10. Prepress, Preflight, and Printing
    • Definition of Pre-flight and Pre-press
    • Preflight
      • What the Printer Wants - Difference Between Desktop and Outsourced Printing
      • The Preflight Option
      • Convert Graphics and Swatches to CMYK
      • Output Preview Palettes: Flattener and Separations Palettes
        • The Flattener Palette
        • The Separations Palette
        • View Modes (bleed)
      • The Links Palette
    • Prepress
      • Packaging Files
      • The Print Window
        • Printing with a Desktop Printer
        • Printing to PostScript File
      • Making Press Ready PDFs
        • PDFs Made Directly with InDesign
        • Using Third Party Applications to Make PDFs
    • Transparency and Tints

  11. More InDesign Features
    • PDFs, Not Only Ready for Press
    • Exporting Options
    • Layers
    • Tables
    • Automatic Page Numbering
      • Numbering and Section Options
    • Setting up Preferences
    • Features from the Menu Bar
    • The Lock Option
    • Shortcuts
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