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Technique Creative skills Customising InDesign

InDesign CS3

Mastering InDesign preferences

InDesign is not just a tremendously powerful layout package, its also hugely customisable. Susannah Hall explains how to change the default settings to suit you
The wide range of preferences and other settings in InDesign can be dened on different levels. You can create settings for each new document that you create by dening them when you have no documents open. However, the preferences and settings you set up wont apply to any documents you open that were generated using different settings. Instead, your preferences will change automatically to match those that the document carries. Once you close the document your preferences will revert to those you originally dened. As well as dening settings at a more global or document level, you can dene settings for each object within your document. So you can dene the default text formatting for a text frame. The aim of this tutorial is to clarify how you dene the settings at each of these levels and to pick out some of the settings you might want to change from InDesigns defaults.

Susannah Hall An InDesign expert as certied by Adobe, Susannah Hall remembers life before Macs and uses her experience to offer training and consultancy. Contact her via susannah@ susannahhall.org.

Time needed 1 hour

Skills InDesign settings

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To dene preferences and settings that apply to every document you create, you need to launch InDesign and proceed without having any documents open. Go to Edit> Preferences if you are using Windows, or InDesign>Preferences if youre on a Mac. The next steps go through some preferences you might want to change.

01

By default InDesign applies leading line by line, so its possible to have a different value applied to a single word-space or letter within a line of text. Sometimes, changing the leading seems to have no effect. If you go to the Text or Type section of the Preferences dialog (depending on your version of InDesign) and check Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs youll avoid such problems.

02

Go to the Units & Increments section of Preferences. If you change Origin to Page rather than Spread, the x value resets to 0 on the right-hand page of a spread. So in an A4 document with pages 210mm wide, the x values on the right-hand page restart at 0 and run to 210mm, rather than running between 210mm and 420mm.

03

You can also change the Cursor Key Increments. In InDesign you can hold down Shift when you use the arrow keys to move an object ten times as far. There is no key to decrease the distance moved, but you can reduce this increment by ten (make it 0.025mm) to rene the effect of the arrow keys.

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If you use keyboard shortcuts to increase and decrease the point size (Shift+Ctrl/Cmd+< or >) then you may want to change the amount the point size changes to 1pt. Also, the default increment for kerning (changed using the keyboard shortcut of Alt+ or Alt+) is high, so its useful to change the value to 4 or 5/1000 of an em.

In the Display Performance section you can change the values for the Typical display setting, which is the default. Consider adjusting the Vector Graphics setting to Higher Quality while leaving the Raster Images on Proxy. Doing this will mean that vector EPS images appear as high quality. Vector EPSs, unless they are very complicated, require fewer screen resources to display than raster images.

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Technique Creative skills Customising InDesign

07

InDesign CS3 has some new settings. Snippets arent automatically placed on the page where they were originally. To change this choose Position at Original Location in the File Handling section. You can also decide whether relinked images retain the originals dimensions and positioning.

08

As well as changing the Preferences with no documents open, you can also change various palette settings. For example, you can delete some default colours and add your own to the Swatches palette , or make sure that Paste Remembers Layers is selected in the Layers palette.

09

To change the default settings within an individual document, deselect everything and change a palette setting. However, be careful: its easy to do this accidentally. For example, adding Text Wrap in the Text Wrap palette when no frames are selected will mean that all new frames have Text Wrap applied.

10

Its also easy to accidentally change other attributes of text frames. For instance, go to Object>TextFrameOptions with no frames selected and the gutter width you choose (or any other changes) will be applied to all new text frames.

You can also change the default settings for tools. Select the Text tool, make sure that no text is selected, and change the text formatting. You can select the font, point size and so on, and when you create new text frames from then on, the text you add will appear with that formatting.

11

You can use the principle outlined in Step 11 to apply an Object Style to the Frame tool so that every new frame you draw has that Object Style automatically applied. Deselect everything in your document, select the Frame tool and click the Object Style you want to apply.

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Setting up templates
It is particularly important to dene the correct preferences and settings for your templates, because the preferences set for a template apply to any document it is subsequently used to create. You should dene the text formatting and any styles that will automatically be applied to text placed in a text frame. Likewise, you can dene whether new frames will automatically have Text Wrap or several columns.

In both a template and a standard document, you can select a text frame and dene the text formatting or style sheet that will be applied when you Place text. This is another thing that you could easily set by accident since you only need to select the text frame with the Selection tool and choose the formatting or style sheet you want to apply before deselecting the frame.

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Finally, its handy to know that if you want to reset your preferences back to their defaults, its this easy: launch InDesign and as its starting up hold down Ctrl+Shift+Alt on Windows or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Cmd on a Mac. A dialog will ask if you want to delete the current InDesign Preference les.

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