For the past couple years, I have been cranking out a handbook-manual for my workshops in Comic Life, because it is a handy way to make charts and graphs. But once the document got to be over 50 pages, ComicLife started choking and messing up in different ways.

The manual is about 100 pages, 70 pages of charts and images, 30 of bullet-point text.

I need to be able to email a PDF from the program and have it printed wherever I am, and secondarily have the PDF available to the students to read on their devices.

I need to decide on the best program:

1. Go to PAGES
2. switch to KEYNOTE and print and export to PDF from there
3. switch to iBooks Author

What do you recommend I rely on as the program to handle the content?
I definitely need to be able to print physical textbooks and export to PDF to send to printers.

(I actually got frustrated with the tools and just put the manual up on a website, svarasa.com, because Rapidweaver can handle anything.)

(I write books in InDesign, but I don't know how to use it well enough to toss all this imagery into it.)

Tossing imagery into indesign is easy. Just drag it onto a page from the finder. If you already do books in ID, you're halfway there.

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If you already have InDesign and use it for text that is hands down the best tool for what you want to do.

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C(-)ris
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If you really *want* to keep using Comiclife, could you technically split the book into two volumes ? That gives you a 'basic' and 'advanced' booklet.

If your audience is sufficiently upscale, authoring it as an iBook may win you a wider audience and a more Apple-karmic experience.

You could stick with Comic Life and split your handbook-manual into two parts, which can be joined later.


"If you already do books in ID, you're halfway there."


Yes, at some point you should learn more about ID.

Missed it by that much.

OK, I am playing with tossing PDFs and png files into an InDesign document, and the images look blurry on the page. Trying all sorts of images.

There must be a setting in InDesign - or maybe I have to store the original image in a folder that I tell ID about, and the "image" in the document itself is just a placeholder?

[help.adobe.com]

Go to View > Display Performance > High Quality Display.

The higher the quality you display the slower InDesign runs. You're just seeing an optimized version that is the best compromise between display and performance. It's got nothing to do with how the file will output.

I've got mine set to Typical. I'll switch to HQ just to see if it looks right or if I really need to line something up visually. Then switch back to Typical.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2012 03:44PM by bazookaman.