If you're using tracking to control the look of your type at the paragraph level -- like I will confess to doing in the past -- you're missing out on features that give you far greater control of your type and make for much better-looking paragraphs. This episode covers Justification, Hyphenation, Glyph Scaling, Optical Margin Alignment, and typographic color.

I usually stick to things that can be done automatically within InDesign, but every now and then, you can't avoid the fact that some things just haven't made it into the product yet. In this episode, I demonstrate two methods for getting a solid-to-transparent gradient into your layout. It should be a lot more simple than this (Adobe, are you listening?), but where there's a will...there's a workaround.

In response to a subscriber who was concerned about using Transparency without causing output problems, this episode provides guidelines for best practices in documents that contain transparent objects. From layers to flattening to exporting, I lay out my four simple rules for avoiding the pitfalls of outputting transparency.

Collect your custom characters into an easy-to-use set by using the Glyphs palette. Whether you need quick access to dingbats, accented characters, fractions or any other special glyphs, you can keep them available in a palette rather than scrolling through font menus and remembering obscure keystrokes.

When you actually read the InDesign User Guide cover-to-cover -- which I did to study for my recent Adobe certification exam -- you actually find a lot of things you didn't know InDesign could do. In this episode, I take a look at Automated Jump Lines -- a feature that was new to me and that I immediately started using at work every day. It's not one of InDesign's sexier features, but it's one of those smart and useful touches that are always such a treat to discover.

Add bells and whistles to your rows and columns in the conclusion of the three-part Tables series. Examples of real-world design projects that feature tables are used to demonstrate placing graphics and shapes into tables as Anchored Objects, how transparency is treated in tables, using tables in combination with other InDesign features, and nesting a table inside another table.

The second installment of the Tables series gets down to the smallest details. This "intermediate" episode covers the settings you can apply in the Table Options and Cell Options dialog boxes, how InDesign differentiates between Header, Footer and Body rows, how to automate Alternating Fills and Strokes, threading a table across multiple frames and pages, and just what the difference is between the "Exactly" and "At Least" options.

If you haven't already discovered InDesign's robust table-creation feature, you're going to be quite impressed by what it can do. If you're familiar with tables, but haven't used them that much, you're going to find that the level of design control you have over tables -- and the ways in which you can use them -- is FAR BEYOND what you might have expected. This episode is the first of a two-part series where we explore how good tables can improve your design and good design can improve your tables.

As designers, we have a lot of stuff we need to have at our disposal quickly. But finding a place for that stuff and knowing what stuff you need is a challenge. This episode covers a great place in InDesign for your stuff: Libraries. What are they? What are they for? How do you use them? Learn how having a place for your stuff can help you get more stuff done.

There's nothing wrong with your monitor. This is NOT a video episode. This week, there's more to talk about than to see as I discuss re-creating old layouts -- specifically QuarkXPress layouts -- in InDesign, and I talk you through my method for creating and using a "tracing" of your old file to help speed up the process.