OK. I am not a book designer.....yet. But I am off to a decent start. I stopped working last night at around 1am and a have a first version of all of my images pasted with text and layout more or less to my liking. I feel that I have a very basic understanding of how to use InDesign - the online video tutorials and help were very good. I can't help but realize that I am a beginner in a vast, complex program - but I know enough to get the book done at the quality level I want. I am sure that it takes me 10 times longer to do something with it than an experienced user would take for the same task; that will have to be good enough for now.

I am impressed with InDesign; it has an elegant interface and seems to be extremely capable. I plan to do more publishing so will save up and buy a copy when the 30 day trial runs out. Good sales technique Adobe!

I am still struggling with a couple of issues:
- JPEG quality. I tried to shrink the JPEG's from LR before I pasted them into ID and tried a variety of settings. So far, 100 dpi at an expected image size and 50% compression seems OK. The images still do not look as good as they do in Lightroom. Natt responsed to my post last night and suggested that I paste full rez/quality JPEG's into ID and let ID do the downsampling when the PDF is exported. I'll give this a quick test tonight to see if it merits re-pasting my 50 images (I know to do this now so it will be fast).

- Picture captions. I don't yet know if there is a function to do this other than having to manually insert a text frame with caption under each image. Any ideas or suggestions here?

The best part is looking at my book in full pasteboard view and scrolling through it. I can see the story and sequence emerge - it is exciting. I will finish tonight and upload to Issuu and the SFB website. After today, I will revise the book layout using Blurb's new InDesign template and test print a physical book.