A Few Good InDesign Tips, Part 1

David Blatner

23

I asked several of our contributors for one or two good little tips. Here’s what they came up with today:

Pariah S. Burke:

Would you agree or disagree with the following statement: Ruler guides are always cyan or blue. If you agreed, you’d be (happily) in error. If all you use are the default guides, a page can quickly become a confusing tangle of blue lines. When you’re zoomed in, is this the top of the section guide or the guide you used to align a caption to a keyline?

If you use different colored ruler guides for different purposes, you’ll never have that problem. Unlock guides by ensuring that View > Lock Guides is unchecked, and then, with the black arrow Selection tool, select the guides that should be a different color. Go to Layout > Ruler Guides. In the Ruler Guides dialog box you have dozens of color choices available enabling your guides be guiding rather than confusing. Note that new guides you create will be the default cyan color… unless you choose Ruler Guides while nothing is selected on your page (that changes the default ruler guide color).

Sandee Cohen:

If you see a yellow highlight in table cells, it is an indication that you have decimal numbers that can’t fit in the table cell with their decimals lined up correctly. Instead of lining the numbers up according to the position of the decimal tab stop, InDesign will shift the numbers to the left or right so that they are visible within the cells. However, the yellow highlight indicates that the alignment to the tab stop is off. To get rid of the yellow highlight, as well as line up the numbers correctly, select all the numbers in all the cells and then open the Tabs panel. Move the decimal tab stop until the highlight disappears.

Oh, one more thing: Unlike regular tab information in table cells, you don’t need to insert tab characters before the decimal numbers in a table. Just set the tab stop character. The numbers will align automatically.

Steve Werner:

When you want to copy some pages from one InDesign file to another, make the windows for both files visible. Select the pages to be copied in the source document in the Pages palette/panel, and drag them to the destination document window. In InDesign CS2, they will always be placed at the end of the destination document. In InDesign CS3, a dialog box will ask where in the destination document the pages should be placed.

Claudia McCue:

Tables for Two, Two for Tables:

When you’re in a table cell, you frequently need to toggle between selecting text and selecting the cell itself. Clicking-and-dragging can be frustrating: instead, press the Esc key to toggle between text and cell. (The irony is that you never escape…)

When you need to select individual strokes in a table, the blue proxy in the Control panel will drive you crazy. “Blue” means “selected,” but the natural tendency is to click on the one stroke you want to change — thereby Deselecting it. Doh! There’s an easier way: triple-clicking an edge of the proxy deselects ALL the strokes. It takes half a second, then you can select the stroke (or strokes) you do want to affect.

David:

Okay, here’s two more, from me:

The Tabs, Find/Change, and Spelling dialog boxes are like palettes (they float but don’t have to be closed to work on the document). In CS3, you can close any of these by making sure the cursor focus is inside one of these and pressing Esc. (In CS2, you could open AND close Tabs by pressing Command-Shift-T, but in CS3 that only opens it.)

Want to apply a quick keyboard shortcut to a paragraph or character style? Just open the Edit Style dialog box, click in the Shortcut field, and press the shortcut you want. But there’s a trick: This ONLY works with the numeric keypad keys on your keyboard! So Ctrl-Shift-6 won’t work, but Ctrl-Shift-keypad 6 does!