microsoft, munging and being a mercurial iconoclastic geek.

• Home
• About
• AU Alpha Bloggers
• General Melchett
• Lolcats
• LOLKorats
• Shared Items

See Me Live

Find Stuff

How to add live.com search to your site

Meta

• Register
• Log in
• WordPress

About Me

Nick Hodge is a professional geek and digital diplomat for Microsoft in Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

Messenger me

Blog Flair

Blogroll

• Anna Liu - My boss’s blog on architectural things I don’t understand.
• Barbora Zychova - I am Number 2 in the Fan Club.
• Brian Johnson - US East Coast EE dude
• Christian Longstaff - Fellow Microsoft AU videographer
• Crowded House - Crowded House reforming
• Des Walsh - Doyen of the Australian Blogging Community
• Frank Arrigo - Frank Arrigo, Head Geek goes to America
• Geek Girl Blogs - The best geeks are girls
• I Work on the Web - If you work on the Web, join the meme
• John-Daniel Trask - JD is a cool geek guy from Wellington. Does cool stuff with all the Microsoft stuff.
• Jukka Wallasvaara - Finnish
• Kurt Messersmith - Because I am sports knowledge challenged, Kurt is my go-to-guy
• Live Spaces - Experimental Only. Duck.
• Mark Szulc - Adobe all-round expert and nice guy
• Me on YouTube - My channel on SueTube
• Michael Kordahi - Delicate Genius, both names apply
• Mossy Blog - Scott Barnes: webdev.guru
• Nas Khan - Third best NZ’er, WPF+Silverlight: Designer blog
• Nic Filingham - Fellow Aussie Enthusiast Evangelist, in Singapore
• Nick Hodge, Excel MVP - Mr Excel, not me. I am MINI me.
• Nick’s Flickr Photos - All public photos are posted on Flickr.com
• Paul Foster - Pommy Microsoft Geek with Robots!
• ScenarioGirl - The state of UX, Accessiblity
• Shane Morris - User Experience Guru
• Stilgherrian - Mr Nerd from crikey.com.au - but really he is a geek
• The Geek Stories - Nick Hodge’s blog on on10.net
• The Geek Whisperer - Ajay bonding geeks and noobs
• The Podcast Network - Cameron’s New Media Conglomerate
• Twitter - Follow me, almost minute-x-minute on Twitter

indesign

Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity

As far as I am aware, Gary Cosimini and Mike Zahorik are still employed by Adobe.
Whereas I am no longer an employee (shareholder, yes)
Strange honour to be in the credits. If anyone from Microsoft management is looking: no, I am not moonlighting for Adobe.
This might just get me enthralled to do some real-world stuff with [...]

A Journey That Began 10 Years ago…

http://quarkvsindesign.com/articles/a1/features/2008/quark-quitting-desktop/
Wow. August 1998 I began work at Adobe. One of the things that was talked about was "K2" - a product that eventually became InDesign.
Don't know how I feel about Quark changing tack. It is interesting how the world turns.
Thanks for the link, Andrew.

Possibly Related Posts:

Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity
Warping Text using Illustrator CS3
On Location
Let’s just [...]

On Butterflies, Aliens and Mountains

InDesign CS3 has a pretty neat Easter Egg: a good friend and InDesign Evangelist, Tim Cole, details the inner details of this easter egg.
The allusion to InDesign 1.0 through CS2 "Butterfly" motif, and the mountains to InDesign's previous code names themes (K2, Annapurna, Caribiner).
The alien is related to QuarkXpress' alien that appeared when a certain key [...]

Rorohiko ImpositionCompanion for InDesign CS, CS2

The Lightning Brain ImpositionCompanion Plug-In helps to overcome some limitations of InBooklet SE, which doesn't impose correctly when a document contains objects that overlap two or more pages. The Lightning Brain ImpositionCompanion Plug-In unlinks text threads and splits objects which overlap two or more pages. This allows the page order to be changed without problems.

Possibly [...]

CMYK to Grey

Rorohiko have released a plugin for InDesign to convert colour images to greyscale at print time: Rorohiko Color2Gray. Looks like it implements this InDesign technique, but in a much easier way.

Possibly Related Posts:

Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity
A Journey That Began 10 Years ago…
Warping Text using Illustrator CS3
On Location
Let’s just Blame Windows.

Mr. McHugh

Mike McHugh attempts Obscure Aussie InDesign humor on the world, and wins.
The first video-cast I watched was Mike. He's a star with Photoshop - email him and ask him to post more hints retouching cars for print; and also with the whole Creative Suite.
He's a mad keen surfer living in Victoria. I think [...]

CMYK is not Evil

When taking your piece of digital design to the printed world, there is this nasty, some would say: evil, thing called CMYK. Dynamic Graphics magazine has a five-point article on how to survive in a CMYK world. http://www.dynamicgraphics.com/dgm/Article/28597
Excellent read, and even better: tag/bookmark it for later.
Some notes of my own, based on 8 years of [...]

QuarkXpress 7. Disappointing.

According to MacWorld in the US, QuarkXpress 7.0 sucks. Just like Mission Impossible 3, it hasn't been worth the wait.
Unfortunately, XPress 7 does not represent a significant leap forward.

Possibly Related Posts:

Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity
A Journey That Began 10 Years ago…
On Butterflies, Aliens and Mountains
Rorohiko ImpositionCompanion for InDesign CS, CS2
CMYK to Grey

Soduko for InDesign

Rorohiko in Wellington have released a new plugin for InDesign: a must have for publishers. Lightning Brain Sudoku for InDesign CS/CS2. Like crosswords, I don't really "get it" - but this, the Da Vinci Code and Suri are all the rage at the moment.

Possibly Related Posts:

Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity
A Journey That Began 10 Years ago…
On [...]

Quark to InDesign

According to Adam Pratt, another one of those Adobe technical superheros, Markzware has released a plugin called Q2ID- to assist your move from legacy QuarkXpress to InDesign.

Possibly Related Posts:

Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity
A Journey That Began 10 Years ago…
Warping Text using Illustrator CS3
On Location
Let’s just Blame Windows.