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Authors: David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción

Publisher: Blatner Books in association with PeachPit Press

ISBN: 0-321-33413-2

Pages: 246

Price: USA - $24.99 / CAN - $34.99 / UK £17.99

Experience Level: Beginner to Advanced

Besides having one of the more irrelevant cover designs I've seen in ages, InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs does have a good collection of tidbit information. This is a book that does not intend to teach you how to use InDesign. Rather, it is a book that is intended to fill out the details you might have missed at some point while learning how to use, the very powerful, InDesign.

The basic concept of the book is this; after perusing numerous forums and help groups on InDesign, Blatner and Concepción gathered together a collection of questions, and then provide the answers. These are not "real" questions in that they were not copied and pasted into the book, but are instead composites and/or sweetened questions. Consider it a very organized after-dinner situation where there are a bunch of InDesign users and the two authors, and they inadvertently ask, "Gee, do you folks have any questions?" For the next six hours, they get asked a bunch of questions in an orderly and organized fashion.

Some of the questions are specifically for Quark users who are now using InDesign (ID). Some questions are just to provide an insight into an otherwise confusing aspect about how things are done in ID. And lastly, some questions are specifically to bring users up to the improvements and changes that were made from IDCS to IDCS2. Unfortunately there is no listing that breaks these questions down in this manner. Thus, if you are an ex-Quark user looking for specific information just on your issue, you cannot focus on those questions.

The book is organized into logical sections. The chapters are:

1. Palettes and Menus and Windows, Oh My! (how to deal with all the palettes, preferences, shortcuts, and page navigation).
2. Making Pages and Taking Names (setting up new documents, page organization, dealing with master pages, manipulating things on the page, and dealing with layers).
3. Text and Tables (editing, and flowing text, text frames, character and paragraph formatting, style sheets, dealing with fonts, glyphs, tabs, text wrap, and tables).
4. Graphically Speaking (placing images, previewing problems, scaling, manipulating, links, and drop shadows).
5. Color My World (dealing with swatch palettes, colors and gradients, and working with colors).
6. Drawing in InDesign (paths, points, and bent lines, strokes, scaling, and transformations).
7. Long Documents (working with books, TOCs, indexing, and footnotes).
8. Leaving the Nest (printing issues, color issues, separations, transparency problems, and PDFs).

[While the names of the chapter titles above are quoted from the book, the summations are all mine.]

The basic format of the book is that each chapter has a simple page of introduction of the topic and a brief (one page) commentary on the type of problems one might expect to have on this subject. This is immediately followed by the basic format of the book which is a paragraph containing a large drop-cap of "?" and a question and/or comment of a problem the imaginary person is having with ID. This is followed by a large drop-cap of a box with a check mark providing the answer. There are occasional screenshots for explanation purposes and sidebar boxes of "Warnings," "Trivia," "Tips," and occasionally a detailed explanation of how to do something that was explained in a brief answer in the regular text.

This book is pleasantly quite a bit different from the typical "Tips and Tricks" books in that, by utilizing questions, the authors have a forced focus on an issue and/or problem. It's effective. In addition, also by utilizing the question/answer format, the authors provide an excellent mechanism to weave a bit more "story" out of the material. One of my big complaints with most of the "Tips and Tricks" books is that by just providing the tips and tricks, the reader may not have the full understanding of how to do the process that they just learned a tip about, thus rendering the tip as something that soon falls out of the brain. In the case of "InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs," the tips are used to supplement the information provided and are not the sum and substance of the information.

This book is not, and should not, be considered as the only book you will need to use InDesign. What it can do is to provide an excellent supplement to your general InDesign learning. In addition, since it covers information that can be useful to beginners, intermediate, and advanced users, it should provide useful information to most people as they grow with InDesign.

My biggest complaint with the book (besides the cover) is that I feel it is too short. In reading the book, I came up with new (and other) questions about InDesign that were not covered. (I guess I just don't get invited to the right dinner parties.)

In short, this is a great supplement book. It assumes you already know something about InDesign but still have the occasional nagging question. Since the authors point out that a majority of the questions have already appeared on the various web forums, if you were not willing to put out the few dollars for this book you could search the web and join a number of forums for the same answers. Truth is you will spend quite a bit more time and gain nothing more. What I'd really like to see is a formal "How to Use InDesign" book from these two authors. This is just whetting my appetite. I am giving this book 4 "As" only because it is not an absolute have-to-have book, and because it's a supplemental book, not a sole source. If these authors wrote a "How to use..." book, I'm comfortable it would be a "have-to-have."

One last comment: this is another recent book by PeachPit Press where the look of the book is beautiful. The quality of the images, the color, the paper, the type, everything. Peachpit is setting an excellent standard here, I hope they keep it up.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.