Indesign Secrets

My co-host here, Anne-Marie Concepción, is so modest and humble that she’s not going to stand up here and shout about the other work she’s been doing, so I figger I’d better do it for ‘er. Here’s the deal: If you haven’t been reading her new column at CreativePro.com (titled “HerGeekness Says”, you’re missing out. […]

We’ve received two emails this week regarding leading — or, more specifically, InDesign apparently ignoring or changing the leading values of paragraphs.
For example, G. wrote:
…The problem arises when we copy and then paste a text frame into a new document — some of the text blocks (not all) change their leading. But this is the […]

When you rotate an object that has a drop shadow (or an other kind of directional effect), the drop shadow doesn’t rotate! It stays in place. Similarly, if you scale an object that has a drop shadow, the shadow doesn’t scale.
Technically, InDesign is correct: It shouldn’t rotate or scale the drop shadow. Imagine a virtual […]

Colette wrote to us wondering about that alarming message that sometimes appears when you print from InDesign:
This document may contain binary EPS files, which can cause the print job to fail. If the printer produces output, then the binary did not interfere with printing. Do you want to print this document?
This message has freaked out […]

O.G. wrote: You can move an anchored object vertically by clicking on it with the Selection tool and dragging it up or down, but nothing indicates by how many points it’s been moved from the baseline. Is that info shown somewhere? And is there a way to cancel the move later, i.e. to bring the object back to its original position on the baseline, without having to reimport it?

This problem has affected InDesign users for decades! (Well, maybe not that long.) Fortunately, you can see and adjust the value of an inline object’s vertical offset (how far up or down it’s been moved). You need to open Object > Anchored Objects > Options.

Here’s a text frame with an inline object…

Tom e-mailed this question:

In Quark one had access to the control bar with a keyboard shortcut (command-option-M). Is there a shortcut in InDesign to get into the first field of the control palette?

Yes, the one you’re looking for is Command-6 (Control-6 on Windows). That highlights the first field in the Control panel regardless of which mode it’s in. Use the Tab key to move the focus to the next field(s), Shift-Tab to move back.

Other ones I find useful for the Control panel:

We get plenty of questions regarding InDesign’s preflight feature, but they usually come down to, “What the heck?!” Here’s the problem: InDesign’s File > Preflight feature doesn’t totally suck, but it isn’t particularly good. However, because InDesign tends to be chock full o’ great features, users keep thinking, “I bet I just don’t get it. […]

Almost everyone who has used InDesign has encounted the dialog box shown below. It means that one or more of the fonts in the document you just opened are missing. You have a choice here: You can ignore the problem by clicking OK, or you can fix the problem now. Clicking OK will not change […]

InDesign’s Paste Into feature lets you nest one object (or a group of objects, which acts like a single object) inside a frame. It’s essential that you master the concept of pasting into. For example, if you want to move a picture from one graphic frame to another, you should select the image with the […]

One great reason to use InDesign is that you can’t choose Zapf Dingbats italic, or Symbol bold. Those fonts don’t really exist (at least not in the files on my computer), so I can’t select them. Well, sometimes you just neeeed to make it a little more bold, or a bit more oblique (skewed). Please […]