A four-page leaflet and a two-hundred-page manual are different jobs. The leaflet is a layout problem. The manual is a structure problem: chapters that have to renumber when one is inserted, a contents page that has to regenerate rather than be retyped, cross-references that still point at the right figure after the text reflows, and an index somebody will actually use. This course is about that second job, and about getting more than one deliverable out of the file once it is built.
You work on a supplied technical manual of roughly sixty pages, split into chapters. Day one assembles it as a book file, with synchronised styles, running heads driven by text variables rather than typed by hand, and continuous page numbering across chapters. The afternoon builds the apparatus that makes a long document navigable: a generated table of contents, index entries and a compiled index, cross-references, footnotes and endnotes, and figure numbering that renumbers itself.
Day two is production speed and output. You use GREP styles and GREP find and change to fix in one pass the typographic problems that would otherwise take an afternoon, run a data merge from a CSV, and set up conditional text so that one file produces both the customer version and the internal version. The final session takes the same layout out three ways: a reflowable EPUB with sensible export order and metadata, an interactive PDF with hyperlinks, bookmarks, buttons and a fillable form, and a tagged accessible PDF with alt text, table headers and a reading order a screen reader can follow.
This course goes past the published objectives of the Adobe Certified Professional in Adobe InDesign exam rather than mapping to them. If the certification is your goal, InDesign Level 1 is the course built against those objectives, and this one is what you take afterwards to work faster on real documents. As always, we prepare you for the exam, we do not award the certification, and no course can guarantee a pass.
Bring a document of your own that is fighting you. There is time on the second afternoon to look at real files, and long-document problems are usually structural, which means they are usually fixable.
