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Hi-
I'm new to using InDesign. I'm trying to help someone who's creating a book dummy. For artistic reasons, she wants to use her own handwriting as captions for photos. We've experimented with a touchpad and Photoshop to write directly on images. We also want to write in blank spaces -- such as margins, empty pages, etc.
The questions are, can we do this directly in InDesign? If so, how?
I want to emphasize we don't want to use the type tool. We want to write directly onto the page with a touchpad. I know that writing onto paper and scanning is possible, but we'd also like to avoid that.
Thanks for the help.
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Thanks. Yes, we've tried the pencil tool but it seems rather awkward with the anchor points appearing. Is there a way to do this without dealing with those?
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Did you try to use a drawing tablet?
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Having a typeface made seems pretty exorbitant in price, I just look and wow. My recommendation would be hand write each one on a nice white paper. Scan it into photoshop. Clean up what you do not want, drop the background. Then save as a .psd. Place into InDesign as a picture. You can size it in InDesign to fit the hand written captions as needed.
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Thanks. This is the backup plan, but I was hoping to avoid the extra steps of scanning, adjusting in Photoshop, and importing into InDesign.
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I think this is the only reasonable solution, despite the steps involved. It also gives you a great deal of control over the result.
Whatever the result in the final publication, the idea smacks of "But I do this all the time on my iPad!" and may not be easily applicable to a publishing platform, InDesign or any other. There are a lot of such things, trivial/easy on touch or other platforms but not replicable on a desktop/app. 🙂
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Check out Fontself, a plugin for Photoshop and/or Illustrator.
$39 US for just one program plugin or $59 US for both programs.
I've used it and it is fairly easy to create a font.
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Thanks, I'll take a look. But I don't really want to create a font. I want to use the actual handwriting. Seems it's either the pencil tool or write on paper and scan.
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If you write and scan each letter, you can easily make a font. Unless you have a Wacom-type tablet on your computer or an iPad-type tablet, you won't get natural handwriting.
To me, the choices are:
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Thanks, Bob. Forgot to mention a touch-screen computer (even though I have three of them!).