Kvern and Blatner did it again. InDesign CS2 is covered from top to bottom in this must-have reference book, another gem at the Real World series. Beginners as well as experienced desktop publishers will find everything they need in this book.

Real World InDesign CS2 is both a tutorial and a reference guide, but it’s really also an encyclopedic work on desktop publishing with the current market leader. Kvern and Blatner being DTP’ers themselves, they know what they are talking about.

The book starts, as often, with the basics; in this case, the workspace. Very fast the authors move on to more serious work, like Japanese and Asian font settings in InDesign and how to use them. Chapter 2 takes on pages and master pages in InDesign CS2, and advanced operations with these items.

In the chapter on working with text and text frames, Kvern and Blatner cover InCopy CS2, but very shortly, and in my opinion a bit too short to be useful.

Real World InDesign CS2 wouldn’t be the reference it has become if it didn’t discuss InDesign tagged text and what you can do with it, and scripting as well as the creation of interactive PDFs. The book also covers colour management, aliasing spot colours, impositioning, trapping in InDesign CS2, flattening and how and when to do it. Printing and offset are discussed to great lengths, and the long document features of InDesign CS2 get much attention.

In short, this book is probably the only one you’ll ever have to buy if you want to have a clear and concise reference on InDesign CS2 close at hand.