I sure hope I can get some answers to this one - I posted another question regarding leading in Paragraph Styles two days ago and by now it has 28 views and 0 answers! Such support.
Just designing a two-color gradient in CS5 InDesign is headache enough...click on Swatches control panel, see that there is no "New Gradient Swatch" button at the bottom (despite what the books and online help say), click the microscopic menu at the upper right of the panel, select "New Gradient Swatch", only to find that there are only two choices - Linear or Radial - and fiddle with every feature in the window to finally get the color range you want.
Frankly, five very expensive versions of Creative Suite later, I am both amazed and disgusted at the fact that:
- There is no horizontal gradient, only "Linear" (and that is vertical; that is, each color within the range goes top-to-bottom; the range itself is left-to-right)
- There is no seeming way to get a horizontal gradient, or a vertical gradient with the colors reversed. InDesign decides the orientation and polarity (in this instance, dark (left) to light (right) ) of your gradient
And before anyone launches into a lecture about the Window > Color > Gradient option, I already tried that. I don't know what your copy of CS5 InDesign displays on your system, but on mine, that window has no OK button. In other words, you can play around all day long with the Window > Color > Gradient window but you cannot apply what you've settled on to your current project because there is no way to tell the program that "OK, I'm done, please apply the options I've selected to my project or selected swatch."
So, tell me truly, how can a newly-bald user design a simple two-color gradient that has vertical range, where lightest color is at the top and darkest color at the bottom?