Indesign Secrets

Collect your custom characters into an easy-to-use set by using the Glyphs palette and a little-known feature explained in this episode. Whether you need quick access to dingbats, accented characters, fractions or any other special glyphs, you can keep them available in a palette rather than scrolling through font menus and remembering obscure keystrokes.
This episode […]

Sometimes you’ll see the checkerboard pattern on a spread in the Pages palette (indicating that there is some transparency on the page somewhere), but you might not know what is causing it. Perhaps everything looks opaque on the page, but that pattern tells you otherwise. Many people don’t realize that adding a drop shadow or […]

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New InDesign users may know that exporting an ID CS2 layout to the InDesign Interchange format is how CS2 files are “saved back” to CS1 (the CS1 user can open the .inx file and it’ll be converted to an InDesign CS1 .indd file, sans CS2-only features of course).
They may not know what grizzled InDesign […]

Zevrix has released an update to their BatchOutput plug-in for InDesign with several new features, including export to PDF as single pages, and variable PDF file names. In a clever move, you can even automatically insert any text from your InDesign document into the PDF file name. For more information, see http://www.zevrix.com/batchoutput.html.

It’s easy to delete a guide on your InDesign page: Just select it with the Selection or Direct Selection tool and press Delete. But what if you want to delete all your guides? Here’s one of my favorite hidden shortcuts: Command-Option-G/Ctrl-Alt-G. That selects all the guides on the current spread. Now you can press Delete to get rid of all of them at once.

A little tip, but interesting.

When you choose Print… from the File menu, you’ll see a little Preview window of your page in the lower left-hand corner of the Print dialog box. It doesn’t show page content, it just shows the aeffects of your Print settings on the document.

There are actually three different Preview types that can appear here. The one we’re all used to is called the Standard View. Click on it once to switch to Text View, once more to switch to Custom Page/Cut Sheet View, and one more time to go back to Standard View. Here’s a rundown of all three:

For a recent client project, page layout pro and InDesign scripting guru Dave Saunders wrote five separate Javascripts to help fit table elements to the text they contain. He generously posted a link to the scripts (I’ll add the link further down) on the Blueworld InDesign Talk mailing list for others to use, and I hope he doesn’t mind me writing about them here!

The bi-platform, InDesign CS2-only scripts are:

I saw one of the first copies off the press of Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2 at The Creative Suite Conference in Chicago last week, and after having read a chunk of it, I’m pleased to report it’s well worth reading. While other books go into each individual application of the suite, Sandee Cohen […]

Glenn wrote:
I usually compose a booklet as single pages and then do the imposition just before making the plates. I have noticed that drop shadows created in InDesign do not rotate when the page is rotated 180º. I have to manually change the X & Y settings to negative. Although this isn’t a major problem, […]