From the course: InDesign CC to EPUB (2018)

Make a custom workspace

From the course: InDesign CC to EPUB (2018)

Start my 1-month free trial

Make a custom workspace

- [Instructor] If you moved into a house that was completely furnished, even the kitchen has all the spices and the cookware, and you open up the spice cabinet and it had all these bizarre spices that you never use, but the stuff that you always use is toward the back, like salt, pepper, oregano, parsley, that kind of thing, how long would you live there before you finally decided, you know what, I'm gonna move the spices that I never use toward the back and take these guys and move 'em up toward the front so it's easier, it's more efficient for me? That's how I feel about workspaces in InDesign and I'm always hounding friends and colleagues and students, why don't you create a workspace for the kind of work that you do a lot? If you are doing a lot of EPUBs or even an occasional EPUB project, you might as well get your workspace set up for it. All I'm talking about specifically is this guy right here, the dock. Hopefully, you have gone beyond Essentials and you are using Advanced, which I think most InDesign users are set to because that's the one that has the Paragraph and Character styles available to you. There are a lot of unused spices here like Gradient. I never use Gradient, very seldom. I know that I can always get to the Gradient panel from the Window menu, so I get rid of the Gradient panel. I drag it out of the dock, that's where you get the Close box. It's no longer in there. The idea is to get rid of the panels in your dock, which is kinda like the shortcuts to the panels that you use a lot, rather than having to constantly hunt through here for the panels, get rid of the ones you don't use and add the ones that you do use, and make it especially for EPUB. We do use Pages with EPUBs, right? We do have documents, lots of Pages, and Layers, and Lengths. I happen to use Effects and Object Styles, so I'll keep those in, but you know another panel that I use a lot when I'm working with EPUBs is I use the Hyperlinks panel. I create hyperlinks and there's no hyperlinks here, so I'll go to Window, that's an Interactive, I find Hyperlinks and it just floats here. If I just drag it over and drop it someplace where I think it makes sense, maybe in this group or between these two groups. I'll put it here in with the Object Styles and Effects. That looks good, I added Hyperlinks. What else? I use a lot of scripts. I'll be talking about different scripts in this video, but where is the Scripts panel? Why, it's buried. Here under the Window menu, go down to Utilities and there it is in Scripts. It comes grouped with a couple other panels that I hardly ever use, so I'm just gonna drag Scripts out and drop it over here. Now, whenever I need to add a script, I can just quickly look in here. I'll close these other two, and so on. Now, I actually have a PNG file that I saved and I snuck here on the Paste board, but it's in the exercise files, that shows you my EPUB workspace. I can go through and set it up. I use a lot of text wraps, so I'll put Text Wraps here, up over here. I use indexes a lot, but maybe you don't. You don't need to have Index, but maybe you use cross-references a lot. You might as well come here down to wherever Cross-References are, like under Type and Tables, and if you use cross-references in your books, add that here in some place that makes sense. Actually, I'm gonna get rid of Cross spaces because I don't use them a lot but I do use indexes. Let me go back here to Index and add Index right about there. We don't need that. That was our cheat sheet. There's one more in that I'll be talking about in another chapter, Articles. The Articles panel is actually quite useful when you are experimenting with EPUBs to see how a certain section will export. I'm gonna put Articles right up here above Pages. Now that you have setup your panels exactly how you want them, then you can go to the workspace menu, which is Advanced, and choose New Workspace. Make sure and set it up first and then choose New Workspace because it essentially takes a picture of where your panels are and which panels are open and closed, and give it a name. I'll just call this EPUB. I have one on my actual computer that's EPUB with flowable and another workspace for EPUB fixed layout that has all the animation stuff on it. All these can stay the same and that's about it. Now, whenever you're going to work on an EPUB project, you can just switch to your EPUB workspace. Let's say, for example, that you are doing something simple and you don't like Essentials, and then, you wanna work on EPUB, switch over to the EPUB workspace. All of your custom workspaces appear above the separator line. There's no limit to how ever many you want and there you go. You have all the panels right at your beck and call. Let's say, oh, you know what? I really do wanna add Cross-References, or I really don't need Effects, then you can simply fix it. Here I'm just gonna drag Effects out and close it and then go back up here. Now, there's no way to edit an existing workspace, but all you do is choose New Workspace and give it the same name from the drop-down menu. It says are you sure? Yes, please. That's how you edit a custom workspace. Make yourself an EPUB workspace. Get all those spices right at the front so you don't have to keep hunting for all of the tools that you use all the time when you make reflowable EPUB.

Contents