Adobe InDesign CS5 introduced a few new tools, one of which makes creating multiple frames on the page an absolute breeze. In fact, creating them, with equal spacing and setting the spacing all happens in a single go.
‘InDesign’ Archives
InDesign Colour-Coded Highlighting
This is effectively passing on a very helpful tip from InDesign Magazine, thanks for this one. Check out their site for plenty more tips.
If you open an InDesign document or placed copy into an existing document and see the text highlighted in a colour, don’t panic! This is InDesign’s way of letting you know some important information. This is what the highlight colours mean:
Pink: Missing font or a font has been changed to one that does not have a respective member of the font family (Eg. You might not have a bold variant of a changed font on your system.)
Yellow: Hyphenation and Justification (H&J) settings have been tampered with.
Amber: Glyph substitution – one or more alternate glyphs have been substituted for one or more glyphs in a font’s standard set.
Green: Manual kerning or tracking has been applied.
Always make sure you fix the missing font problem. The other three colours don’t necessarily mean anything is wrong -it is just InDesign letting you know something has been changed.
Clean Up Imported Word Documents in InDesign
This post comes straight from InDesign Magazine, but it’s a common problem and I wanted to share it. The link to the original tip is here.
If you’ve imported a Microsoft Word document that’s riddled with problems (for example, two hyphens instead of an em dash, or tabs instead of paragraph indents), don’t repair your file line by line. Instead, use Edit > Find/Change and correct the problems with a single mouse click.
How to Use Baseline Grids in InDesign
When working on text-heavy documents, you may want to use a baseline grid.
Why? Simple, if you have got columns of text of the same size sitting next to eachother and they are not aligned horizontally, your document can look pretty messy!
Hyperlink Rectangles in InDesign
This is a tip that comes from David Blatner at InDesign Magazine;
Banish Ugly Hyperlink Rectangles
To disable the Visible Rectangle option for multiple hyperlinks all at once, select them in the Hyperlinks panel, then go to Hyperlink Options in the panel’s drop-down menu and set Appearance to Invisible Rectangle.
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InDesign – Show All Menu Items
I recently did a clean install of my OS and noticed that InDesign was missing some menu items, such as Preflight etc. Instead, it had several “Show All Menu Items” labels throughout the menus.
To fix this, go to Edit > Menus and change it to the InDesign default set.
InDesign Menus
Creating pdf Bookmarks in InDesign
Using bookmarks to navigate through a pdf is sometimes easier than using the pages option. Creating them is easy.
With your file open, go to the Window > Interactive panel. There you will see the Bookmark tabs. For this example, let’s say our page is 21 and the title of the page is “I’m here.” Click with your cursor inside the text on the page, either the page number or next to the page title. Click the new Bookmark icon (it looks like a page-turn) and give your bookmark a name. Now, go to to the place in your file that you want to use as the source of your bookmark, highlight it (select it if it is an image or graphic) and then click the name of the Bookmark in the Bookmarks panel.
Remember, when you export the pdf, DO include Bookmarks!
InDesign Find/Change
This is a quick tip – InDesign’s Find/Change panel offers the ability to do a whole lot more than spell-checking. As an example, entire objects, strokes and fills, effects and styling can be changed throughout a file quickly and easily. Let’s say you have 235 instances of an object (page furniture perhaps) that is not on a Master page and you want to replace it’s stroke swatch. This is a breeze; simply fire up the Find/Change panel and go through the object elements you want to swap.
Find/Change Panel
Clicking the icon by the cursor in the image above will open a new panel, where you can really go to town.
The text options are self-explanatory (!) but the GREP is a powerhouse worthy of it’s own thread. Hmm, now there’s a thought…
Page Thumbnails in InDesign
By default, the Pages panel in InDesign displays the page thumbnails vertically. Personally, I prefer to see them laid out horizontally. To change this, click the triangle in the top corner of the Pages panel and a sub-menu appears. Go to Panel Options… right at the bottom and uncheck the vertical option on the new panel that opens.
I also tend to change the thumbnail size to small icons.
Switch between open documents in InDesign CS3
I’m still using CS3 for my InDesign work so I don’t have the tabbed-interface. If you have multiple documents open and want to switch between them, use Cmd + ~ on a Mac.
