Here's Episode 11 of Dirty Words Design, which discusses how to quickly edit and preview ePub files using iBooks for OS X.

Let's call this episode the first one of Season Two ... I'll be updating the blog to a new theme soon and working on more videos. Feels like I've got the bug again!

A few notes:

You can unhide your Library folder by first selection your Home folder in the Finder, then going to View -> Show View Options (Command-J), as seen in the screenshot below. If you are not in your Home folder, this option will not appear!

I use these scripts for unzipping and rezipping ePub files: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55681—that post also contains the commands that you can use in Terminal if you prefer handling things that way!

After a long hiatus (I'm sorry!), Dirty Words Design is back with a roughly produced (I'm really sorry!) episode that contains three tips for dealing with InDesign Table of Contents and using them in ways that may not be typical! (I'm totally not sorry!)

Topics discussed are:

Duplicating a Table of Contents Style

Avoiding the import of Character Styles into a Table of Contents

Using a Table of Contents on a Master Page to create book-wide hyperlinks

Good: I've managed to fix my low audio problems and the videocast should be much more listenable now.

Better: InDesign CS5 includes a nice feature that allows you to export PDF files in the background while you work on other stuff!

Worse: This background export functionality doesn't work with Book files.

Better: This episode of Dirty Words Design explains how it works and how it doesn't.

This episode of Dirty Words Design shows you how to harness the power of two InDesign CS4 features—GREP Styles and Live Preflight—together to automatically detect if your document contains specified placeholder text, such as the dreaded "page XX" reference or notes from editors to layout or vice-versa.

Rorohiko's Soxy 1.0 for OS X has just been released, with a Windows version in beta. This episode of Dirty Words Design shows you how to use Soxy to easily manage multiple versions of InDesign at the same time -- no accidentally opening old files in the newest version of InDesign or vice-versa! I also demonstrate how to assign a different application to open specific PDF versions.

The Edit Original command is one of the best ways to quickly move between the Creative Suite applications from within InDesign, but it can misbehave under OS X. Here's how to use it, and how to fix it if it stops working as expected!

Episode 5 of Dirty Words Design runs down the basics on why you would want to create a layered PDF, how to export one from InDesign, and a few tips for manipulating those layers in Acrobat.

Bumper music is by Creature.

The Dirty Words Design Videocast is made available under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.

In this episode I look at a script that can be used to quickly find and replace pairs of paragraph style combinations. It's a great free script from Thomas Silkjær that can save you a bundle of production time!

Important Links

Thomas Silkjær's totally awesome Fixing Paragraph Style Combinations script.

Bumper music is by Creature.

The Dirty Words Design Videocast is made available under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.

This is a short episode; I take a look at setting InDesign document preferences and default preferences that get applied to all new InDesign documents, also how to create Styles [Paragraph, Object, Character] that are automatically imported into new documents, and how to set Styles and some other settings so they get applied to new objects and text by default.

My microphone seems to be acting more sensitive since I upgraded to OS X 10.5.7, so I apologize if the background clicking and typing is more obvious than usual in this episode.

Bumper music is by Creature.

The Dirty Words Design Videocast is made available under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.

Thanks for waiting—here's Episode 2 of Dirty Words Design; a grab-bag episode that revisits Episode 1 and further explains Packaging vs. Copy Links, and a "feature" of Packaging that you may not be aware of. I also give a brief overview on exporting a document to PDF while turning all the text in it to outlines; based on David Blatner's article. It's a technique that hopefully you won't have to use, but it's good to know in case you need it in a pinch!

Important Links

Converting Text to Outlines the Right Way by David Blatner

Bumper music is by Creature.

The Dirty Words Design Videocast is made available under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.