Indesign Secrets

Most of us are at The InDesign Conference in Miami right now, so it’s hard to get away to post tips. However, I was sitting at the AskMOGO desk yesterday and an attendee asked an interesting question: She has a lot of index markers in a document, often one right next to the other, and she wanted to know how to figure out what each index marker refers to.

The problem is that after you place an index marker, it’s just not obvious how to open the Page Reference dialog box to see how it was indexed (how it shows up in the index, what range it has, and so on)…

Michael Ninness, Adobe’s Senior Product Manager of InDesign, opened The InDesign Conference in Miami today with a demo of some technology that Adobe is working on. He made it very clear that this was not necessarily going to be in any future version of InDesign, but that they’re considering it and wanted to get the […]

Let’s say you’re working on a layout but you need to get a colleague to design a piece of the spread — perhaps a coupon, or a sidebar, or an ad. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just hand a piece of the layout to them? InDesign CS3 makes this possible by letting you […]

KRB wrote:

I have some documents with old indexes, which I need to delete to start all over from scratch. I can’t seem to find a way of removing all the index entries. Any suggestions?

That is frustrating! Fortunately, Find/Change comes to the rescue…

J.K. wrote:
I am in the process of printing a postcard out of InDesign CS3. The background was created in Photoshop CS3, and the information has been added with InDesign. When printing a proof from Photoshop, I get the color I expect to get. Printing out of InDesign, I do not. I even created a box […]

The InDesign Conference has a history of being a staging ground for new technologies that Adobe is working on. Apparently, Adobe will once again use the keynote address at The InDesign Conference in Miami next week as a forum for showing some new technologies involving both InDesign and Flash.

InDesign’s relationship with Flash has been a bit rocky in recent times, because while you can technically import SWF files into InDesign…

Daniel wrote:

I’ve linked boxes of text throughout a whole document. Is there a quick/simple way to unlink these boxes without losing the formatting/flowing of the text?

Yes! Next question?

Oh, sorry, you want more details? We talked about this a bit back in Podcast Episode 49, but if you skipped that one, here’s the deal:

There is a really slow way, and two fast and easy ways…

Hot off the newswire… I just received this note from someone at Adobe:
“We have written and re-posted the InDesign CS3 recertification exam, rewritten the practice questions on the prep guide, and this week we are going to temporarily take down the InDesign CS3 certification exam and revise that too. The new recertification exam is listed […]

It’s always frustrated me that kerning doesn’t show up in the character style dialog box as a field that I can enter a specific amount.
I often want to apply kerning to a specific glyph as part of a character style which could then be part of a Find/Change routine.
But how can you make a character […]

In an earlier post I presented a workaround for entering non-native language diacritics (like the grave accent in à la carte) by using InDesign’s built-in spellchecker, which can add them for you. It’s a slick solution, but it requires some set-up — you have to enter a word incorrectly and have InDesign correct it.

I recently learned of a better way to insert any difficult glyph into the text flow, correctly, on the fly: Peter Kahrel’s compose.jsx script for Adobe InDesign (Mac/Windows, CS2/CS3, donationware — download instructions are at the end).