Go Team
Sutter Health, being a non-profit, is held responsible for providing a benefit to the community. What you see here represents the results of countless hours of cat wrangling by the community benefits team. Coordinating spreadsheets and data points, and personal anecdotes from over two hundred organizations–some tiny, others vast medical centers– is not for the faint of heart. I have much appreciation for those of you involved in this process and hope that my presentation is worthy of that effort. Thank you so very much.
Variable Text
Only a few technical lessons on this one for my fellow Adobe InDesign artists. For instance did you know that for the "Variable Text" to populate itself correctly, (ie the running chapter footer based on an h1 tag), the source text block needs to be physically on that page or prior. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, however some images lend themselves to being on the left of the spread (pg 27) meaning their footer precedes the source and would auto-populate with the previous section title. Tracking down why this didn't work was an exploration in layering and paragraph styles. Ultimately I found that creating a text box that lives on artboard and just barely overlaps onto the page, being easy to find, works best. If that doesn't work at first, zooming in and out usually updates it. Fun.
ADA Workflow
Another hurdle has been plaguing inDesign for years and thats ADA compliance. Which is kind of a big thing particularly for the medical industry. I highly recommend everyone create a simple layout with a few layers and text boxes. Then import that into a dedicated PDF reader for ADA. When I make ADA PDFs I want to make sure they work. That means more than just checking that the read out loud function works correctly. I want the text reflow to work, the tags to be correct, the bookmarks to function, the images alt-tagged and language and document title to pass. All that not so fun stuff. With all the effort put into inDesign (structures, articles, and liquid layout) its amazing that there is no workflow that works 100% in inDesign. Question for other designers, what is your most effective ADA workflow? Most consistent for me is having the layering order correct for each page. Whats weird and inconvenient is that the first text needs to be the lowest item in terms of z-order. That doesn't always work out so well. While most of the time this can be fixed in Acrobat, the problem arises when you make all these fixes in Acrobat, then your editor wants to make changes. Any corrections made in Acrobat are then lost when you re-export from inDesign. Solve that workflow, and I'll spend more of my time sailing the open seas, or teaching my little mate all about the Dracorex, so win-win.
