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Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients
Mastering Basic InDesign Vocabulary
All industries have their jargon to describe unique approaches, tools, attri-
butes, and specifications. Publishing is no different. Its vocabulary includes
pica, kerning, crop, and color model. But because programs like InDesign
bring a once-specialized capability to the masses, the terms are sometimes
used incorrectly. Sometimes, they’re replaced with general terms to make
nonprofessional users feel less threatened, but that substitution ends up
confusing professional printers, people who work in service bureaus, and
Internet service providers. Throughout this book, I define other publishing
terms as they come up.
In addition to using publishing-industry vocabulary, InDesign comes with its
own specific terminology, much of it adopted from other Adobe products.
Terms to know include the following:
Frame: The container for an object. A frame can hold text, a graphic, or
a color fill.
Link: The connection to a graphics or text file that you import, or place,
into an InDesign document. The link contains the file’s location and its
last modification date and time. A link can reference any graphics or text
file that you’ve imported into a layout. InDesign can notify you when a
source text or graphics file has changed so that you can choose whether
to update the version in your layout.
Package: The collection of all files needed to deliver a layout for printing.
PDF: The Adobe Portable Document Format, which has become the
standard for sharing electronic documents. No matter what kind of
computer it’s viewed on (Windows, Macintosh, Palm, or Unix), a PDF
document displays the original document’s typography, graphics repre-
sentation, and layout. With InDesign, you can place PDF files as if they
were graphics, and you can also export its InDesign pages to PDF format.
Plug-in: A piece of software that loads into, and becomes part of,
InDesign to add capabilities to the program.
Stroke: The outline of an object (whether a graphic, line, or individual
text characters) or frame.
Thread: The connections between text frames that let a story flow from
one frame to another.