I don't know what I don't know, y'know?


This forum post (Polish, auto-translated into google) mentions the layout video I did for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I do videos like this to share what I know with others, but also to be transparent about what I do not know.

For example, the poster says "he committed many mistakes, how to manually assign attributes to the font and text passages..." This is what I mean. ;)

I know a lot about typography, design and layout, but I don't know what I don't know about InDesign. I hear terms like "grep" and "latex" tossed around. I know they could probably make some aspects of my process easier, but so far I've worked well enough without knowing them.

I must seem like an old man on Google who still clicks the 'submit' button instead of hitting 'enter.' I have much to learn about the technical side of layout. That's something I'll be working on in the future. Meanwhile, get those kids off my lawn, dagnabbit! :P

If you have any resources, tutorials or next steps I should look at, I'm happy to check them out! I also want to give a shout out to Mark Sherry, for helping set up some crazy XML stuff for me in the past. Thanks, Mark!

Comments

  1. lucekApril 8, 2011 at 8:42 PM

    Polish language is one of the most difficult to machine-translate. It happens I'm one of the people deeply involved in the quoted forum and luckily I can straighten the mistake fast enough.

    What cactusse said is: "I do commit a lot of mistakes like manually-assign the font and attributes to text passages or merging illustration into one background and fitting the text into it".

    Mr. Solis - for our small community out there, in the land of Polar bears, where no one besides John Wick (and James Wallis back in 2003) ever dared to roam, for us - you are one of the gods of design. And there's no sarcasm nor irony to it. We admire your elegance, your keen sense of picking illustrations, your lightness in typography. My friend and I are fans of you, John Harper, Jason Mornigstar and Keith Senkowski.

    I hope I reverted your mindset - you're a star :-)


    Maciej

    ReplyDelete
  2. Daniel SolisApril 8, 2011 at 9:05 PM

    Ah! Thanks for clarifying. This is actually a very old post I've had saved for a while. I hope it doesn't come off sounding pouty. I just like to be transparent about my process and to show that I still have a lot to learn, too. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. FredApril 9, 2011 at 12:56 PM

    There are (I believe) some very good guides out there to making light but effective use of GREP in your InDesign work. I use the hell out of GREP stuff, both in search & replace and in the GREP styles stuff they added with CS4, and it's a huge huge part of my efficiency in layout.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Daniel SolisApril 9, 2011 at 1:48 PM

    The first thing I really gotta find out is what "grep" stands for. :P

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownApril 9, 2011 at 4:08 PM

    It's a UNIX acronym so it means nothing, mostly.

    Grep is a *nix command used to search for text strings according to a set of rules called a "Regular Expression". This is normally expressed with a very (very!) obscure language and is a very powerful way to pinpoint a word or phrase, even if it has variable parts and so on.

    To make a long story short (and relevant to your interests) in ID CS4 introduced GREP styles. This way you can define a style that gets automatically applied to, say, all phrases with the format "When says then..." (italic, changed font, say).

    But regexes are an incredibly powerful tool... ping me via email if you want to hear more :)

    But careful with your use of The Force...
    http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

    ^__^

    ReplyDelete
  6. UnknownApril 9, 2011 at 4:10 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownApril 9, 2011 at 4:11 PM

    It's a UNIX acronym so it means nothing, mostly.

    Grep is a *nix command used to search for text strings according to a set of rules called a "Regular Expression". This is normally expressed with a very (very!) obscure language and is a very powerful way to pinpoint a word or phrase, even if it has variable parts and so on.

    To make a long story short (and relevant to your interests) in ID CS4 introduced GREP styles. This way you can define a style that gets automatically applied to, say, all phrases with the format "When [PLAYER] says [PHRASE] then..." (italic, changed font, say).

    But regexes are an incredibly powerful tool... ping me via email if you want to hear more :)

    But careful with your use of The Force...
    http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

    ^__^

    ReplyDelete
  8. UnknownApril 9, 2011 at 4:12 PM

    It's a UNIX acronym so it means nothing, mostly.

    Grep is a *nix command used to search for text strings according to a set of rules called a "Regular Expression". This is normally expressed with a very (very!) obscure language and is a very powerful way to pinpoint a word or phrase, even if it has variable parts and so on.

    To make a long story short (and relevant to your interests) in ID CS4 introduced GREP styles. This way you can define a style that gets automatically applied to, say, all phrases with the format "When [PLAYER] says [PHRASE] then..." (italic, changed font, say).

    But regexes are an incredibly powerful tool... ping me via email if you want to hear more :)

    But careful with your use of The Force...
    http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

    ^__^

    ReplyDelete
  9. Daniel SolisApril 9, 2011 at 5:53 PM

    Heh. I think Blogger thought the string of code was a red flag for spam. :P

    ReplyDelete

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