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Find inner page samples of schoolbooks or DK books, anything with variety in it, and rebuild it.

DK Children's Encyclopedia: The Book that Explains Everything https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0241283868/

Is it possible your cells have a return or other special characters in them?

Open the CSV in notepad++ and I bet you can see what's causing the issue. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/11232/how-to-display-invisible-characters

Plenty of other font managers out there. I used to use Font Explorer X Pro, but a year or two ago switched to RightFont and it’s been great cause now I can sync my library between my laptop and desktop.

Like the watermark in the PDF, password protection is super easy to get around with sites like https://smallpdf.com/unlock-pdf. Just google "unlock pdf." I use that site all the time because sometimes my work calls for it and it's much quicker than asking for clients' logos or what not.

Same as the others, I mainly design brochures and keep every major update. For my last job, a 16-page brochure, I've kept 9 versions. I only keep the current and previous on my computer, the others on an external hard drive.

A good resource for color palettes is ... https://color.adobe.com/fr/create/color-wheel, where you can design colors or pick a set from other users. There's a CMYK option there, to work in this color mode. Saved palettes can be made abailable directly in your Indesign CC Library panel.

You can also manually create swatches in Indesign by, for instance, drawing rectangle boxes and assigning color to them, By selecting an object, its color can be added to the document swatches by clicking the Add button of the swatches panel.

When you're done, all the swatches (ctrl/cmd click the ones you want) can be exported as an .ase file which other apps can recognize and use. This can be accessed through the options upper right icon of the swatches panel.

It looks like (on windows at least) all the illustrator swatches are 'adobe swatch exchange' files saved in 'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [VERSION]\Presets\en_GB\Swatches' - so you should be able to copy those somewhere handy and load them into Indesign via swatches panel menu > load swatch.

However as /u/leftnotracks said having too many is kinda unhelpful. Depends how you work I guess, so if it's fine for you go for it. However my personal way of working is to use the adobe color site to create a theme around colours I like. You can then save them and download as an .ase to load in - or use Window > Colour > Adobe Colour themes to access your saved themes from the site. (You can also make themes there, but I find the site easier).

If you have an iPhone, then you're a special flower who adobe has deemed import and hip enough to use their Adobe Colour App; which does the same thing but makes using photos to get colours from easier or something.. (I'm one of those dirty unwashed plebs who uses that 'alternative' 'minority' android platform that adobe can't be arsed to program for....)

*ahem*

There are guides around for working with swatches in indesign, but mess around with them a little first - you can change colours after applying and stuff which can confuse people if they're not aware of it.

I agree it's probably not the best of the Adobe suite for your needs and that Illustrator is going to be your best bet.

Might I suggest you investigate the 30 day trials of the Affinity tools as well? A hell of a lot cheaper than Illustrator or Photoshop and does probably most of what you need (although Illustrator has the text warp tool which you might fall in love with and which Affinity Designer lacks).

Hmm, I didn't realize that the emoji was being stripped out of tab delimited files too. Sorry.

In order to use data merge you have to have the file in comma separated values or tab delimited. So if both are stripping out the emoji (which i believe has something to do with the encoding) then your best bet is to keep the one that is saving it as gibberish characters and not question marks. That way you can just use a find and replace Indesign.

Also, you will need to make sure you have a font installed that uses emoji in order to display the characters properly. In my example I used Wingdings because that's the only font I had on my pc that had a smiley face.

Example: http://recordit.co/TiLnhfKzPh

Learning InDesign won't do much for your ability to lay out a document or direct others in doing so. It'll only help you understand how to use a software tool. If you're looking to make the jump, you'd want to put emphasis on learning / brushing up on general design principles before fixing on the software. I'd recommend reading:

• Elements of Typographic Style by Bringhurst

• Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Müeller-Brockman

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte

Once you've read these (especially Elements), you'll have a firmer idea for what needs your attention in InDesign, and you'll probably learn it faster. Because you'll understand what you need to know versus just being faced with a ton of random features and attempting to find your way through them all.

I've had it at 100%, same issue. Then I read on several sites https://www.shutterstock.com/support/article/how-to-embed-fonts-in-indesign

I'm still lost on how to flatten the transparency. If I click file - properties I don't get a fonts option?

Go for it, I switched to a ultrawide a year ago and handle 1-3 design jobs a day. It's far better then dualing monitors, as we tend to be parallel to our primary monitor for work with half of secondary monitor out of focus, but with a ultrawide you're able to essentially have that 2nd half of the monitor that's out of focus now available on the other side. 16:9 to me now feels claustrophobic.

One thing I'd make sure to look out for when choosing a ultrawide for design is to make sure the screen doesn't have too much of a curve like Samsung's Odyssey series, you want it more on the flat end to not distort your perception.

This is my current monitor

LG 34GP83A-B 34 Inch 21: 9 UltraGear Curved QHD (3440 x 1440) 1ms Nano IPS Gaming Monitor with 160Hz and G-SYNC Compatibility - Black (34GP83A-B) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DWD38VX/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_i_5TJ5CSXKPKCQTS5WAXSE?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

I actually made this for you in HTML/CSS/JS! It was a fun challenge. I don't think that this is going to be possible in InDesign/data merge without extensive Excel work to generate the randomization. Take a look at this link (sorry, didn't have the fonts).

https://codepen.io/anon/pen/zJWQwW?editors=0110

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I implemented lots of checking during the randomization, so

• the same number will never be used twice on the same card
• the free spaces will never appear adjacent (both horizontally and vertically)

It's mathematically sound; I did a simulated test on 100,000 cards and they were all unique and matched all the rules.

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There are several configuration options in the CSS and JS code sections, so feel free to play with those.

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You can print from webpages (not that link though) with very accurate precision: basically, you could determine a page size, and then print a multi-page PDF at those dimensions. Get in touch and I'd be happy to help you make adjustments to print it out.

Couple other things you could check.

1. If you're opening the file from a packed folder move the fonts folder after you've installed the fonts. I've seen this cause font conflicts.
2. Roboto is in Adobe font (assuming you have Creative Cloud). See if you have it activated there as it can cause font conflicts if you installed the original packaged version too.
3. Try installing the font directly from either Adobe fonts or Google fonts. These should have the latest version that might work better with Windows 10.

If you post a screenshot of your document fonts (Type > Find/Replace Font), that would help confirm there are no font conflicts/ troubleshoot the issue.

InDesign does not have an in-build feature like that. You'd have to use some stock images and place them one by one in your document.

There's some free stuff available on several sites like this:

https://www.freepik.com/search?format=search&page=1&query=stickers&selection=1&type=vector

Here is the IDML export file. Is it supposed to be significantly smaller size than the INDD? DropBox with package is uploading, so it may be a while for that.

>Do not ever trust any sort of automated translation - it can't read context, and so can wind up wrong, and with bad sentence structure. It's really only good for getting a sense of what is being said.

I agree only in part with this. Have a look at this analysis on the state of Machine Translations: https://www.slideshare.net/KonstantinSavenkov/state-of-the-domainadaptive-machine-translation-by-intento-july-2018
I've been following this technology for some time now, and especially in the last two years it dramatically improved. See slide 31. It's pretty incredible to see how good Google MT is. I completely agree that there is still the need of a human that proofreads and edits the suggested translations but "merging MT with humans" is definitely something to evaluate. Not just for the costs (MT costs about 0,2% compare to human translation) but mainly for speed and quality. It might sounds crazy to mention quality here, but providing a suggestions from a huge dataset (like Google's one) is actually incredibly helpful for a translator (source: personal experience)

/edit typo

Affinity Publisher is 30% off at the moment: One time payment of $37.99. Could do the free trial and see if you like it.

Agree that InDesign is where it's at, but Publisher (NOT Microsoft) is a solid alternative.

Slightly related, but for searching for files I can’t recommend https://www.voidtools.com ‘Everything’. Insanely fast search and helped me find files I could locate using windows search. P.S. I don’t work for the company - just a really satisfied user.

>Maybe there really a ghost file on your Mac, but I can't say for sure.
Activate the hidden files view and search for it maybe it's saved somewhere
>
>If you didn't try yet delete all the Font Caches basically everywhere. Here is a good instruction for the adobe cache.

I've used https://birdfont.org/ (mac) before to build and customize a icon font set. I was producing a magazine and wanted icons for contact deets etc, and a few custom icons. It's pretty easy to use, export svg from AI and import into birdfont.

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You can do a GREP search on the merged document

~a\t$

That will search for and select anchored object, tab, end of paragraph

I can't see you example. If I was doing a data merge like this, I think i'd skip the image box bit and create an icon font set at http://fontello.com/ then using that font for a "bullet" paragraph style for each contact detail.

Good thing about setting up as bullet, you can assign a char style to the bullet to customize the colour and scale of bullet/icon.

InDesign does have a steep learning curve and there are some technical issues you'll meed to master (fonts, image prep, page imposition, etc.) in addition to layout skills. But don't let that stop you -- you can do it if you have time to learn as you go. It will help a lot if you have a strong interest in graphic design.

Here's a link to a free magazine template . . . not exactly a yearbook but lots of layout to help you get started.

https://creativemarket.com/ThomasMakesStuff/1994933-WAVERIDER-MAGAZINE

Download these and mess with the layout to get a feel for how things work.

See if your school has a mentorship program . . . if so, they may be able to connect you with a local graphic designer who can help you get started. If you can't find a local mentor, come back here and ask for help.

You can also download mockups in PSD format. Search for example for “Magazine mockup” the pages are Smart objects you only need to put your design in it.

EDIT: https://www.freepik.com/free-psd/open-a5-magazine-mockup_1826866.htm#page=1&query=Magazine mockup&position=15

I love InDesign but only because I can afford it. If you want software in which your students can learn design and practice at home for free, it makes more sense to introduce them to Scribus.

Since you mentioned Inkscape, I’ll share an open source InDesign alternative: https://www.scribus.net/

I recently read an article somewhere about folks in India using this as part of an Open Source toolset for publishing. Seems neat. I still use indesign, but if you’re not already paying for a Creative Cloud license, it might be useful.

In either case, YouTube tutorials is a good starting point.

Try NoMachine, I just transitioned 15 in-house designers to remotely control their Macs from Windows laptops and the lag is minimal even through a VPN

It uses either VP8 or h.264 to stream only updated areas so its very responsive, compared to other remote desktop solutions which feel laggy from sending full-frame images at predetermined rates

Have you tried Google's remotedesktop.google.com? I've had the occasional crash when placing items into documents, but for the most part, it works well, running on my iMac at work, and displaying on an external display plugged into my Chromebook.

What is this, a newspaper for ants?

From what I can tell - it looks pretty good. Not sure about the collage at the end, but otherwise. This is the last thing I did in InDesign.

I've recently started doing more print in my work and the book designing for print is really good for understanding how printing works. If you're looking for more ID related things the book InDesign Type is one I'd recommend.