Adobe Creative Suite 2 CLASSROOM IN A BOOK [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Using InDesign for your presentation

Whether presenting a slideshow to a client or an audience, it is vitally important that your slides are convincing in both design and content.

Why presentation applications other than InDesign don't yet support good typography is a mystery. The most obvious shortcoming is the lack of kerning capabilities, which enable a user to create visually equal spaces between all letters, so that the eye can move smoothly along the text. Typeface designers usually spend a considerable amount of time preparing kerning tables, in which they predefine the optimal spacing between pairs of letters to improve the readability of a font. Although this information is included with the font files, some presentation programs continue to ignore the kerning tables. In the illustration below, the letter combinations Wo and Ty have been kerned in the second line, making their spacing visually consistent with the spacing between the other letters in the line.

InDesign not only kerns text properly, but also provides access to other advanced typographic features in OpenType fonts. Also, for working with graphics, you can rely on InDesign's effective integration with Photoshop and Illustrator.

If the resolution of the display device on which the slide show will be presented is known, it is easy to create a document configured with an exactly matching width and height in pixels. That way, no text or images will get scaled, which can cause distortions. When presenting to only one or two people, it is possible to present directly on a PowerBook screen, with its elegant horizontal format. In this case, you can set the presentation to 1152 x 768 pixels. If it's necessary to use a projector, that resolution won't normally be supported, so it is better to set up the document for 1024 x 768 pixels.

Note

When presenting slides in Acrobat in Windows (with a usual monitor resolution of 96 ppi), one can compensate for the higher screen resolution by choosing a custom resolution of 72 Pixels/Inch in the Page Display panel of the Preferences dialog box.