Indesign Secrets

Klaus (yes, that Klaus, a frequent commenter here) wrote us:

How can I clear all Overrides globally, throughout a whole document, for all ParaStyles — and not just on an individual spread basis?

You can do this, albeit somewhat tediously, by taking advantage of what most people consider to be a bug in InDesign:

Daniel wrote: Recently I had to export a document with lists (numbered questions with a, b, c… answers) to RTF, so it could be printed in Braile, but InDesign striped the numbers from the lists when I exported it (no numbers on the questions, no letters on the answers). Do you know any workaroundaround this strange behavior?

I’m going to have to agree with you that this does seem like strange behavior; after all, numbering or bullets are just paragraph formatting, such as indents and so on, and that should export in RTF just fine. However, you’re right that bullets and numbers get stripped away upon export. The good news is that you can convert those lists…

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)…

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…

MY wrote:
I am working on a project that has 15 documents in a book. After I do a global change, I have to activate each document window and save it. Is there a way to tell indesign to save all opened documents? Shouldn’t it be a option in the book’s panel to do this?
I completely […]

Tim Cole has posted a fabulous new tutorial on how to be productive when creating anchored frames frequently. It makes use of the anchored frames feature in InDesign CS2 and CS3, the InDesign Secrets/DTP Tools Keyboard Shortcuts palette, the Story Editor, and drag-and-drop text.
Here’s how it begins:
InDesign’s anchored frames feature is a life-saver for certain […]

Tom wrote: I have been trying to find a way to do an alphabetical sort to produce a glossary of definitions. The project is a manual that has many procedures. We would like to place definitions from all of the procedures and place them in their own section. We have looked for a sorting feature but cannot find one.

While InDesign doesn’t have a sort feature built-in, it does come with a script called SortParagraphs.jsx. In CS2, you have to find this on your install disks or on the Web, but in CS3, it’s installed automatically. When you select some text and run the script, InDesign sorts each paragraph alphabetically.

But I think what you want goes even further than this. It sounds like you want…

This is one of those really esoteric solutions that makes sense for the two or three people who need this specific feature, but I’m writing it out hoping that others will take the concept behind the feature and apply it elsewhere.
First, here’s the problem.
I generate a TOC from the Chapter Names and the A Heads […]

MH wrote:

We are doing a series of children’s books and ample space in between words is crucial — but I want the tracking between letters to stay the same.

I know just what you mean: My son is steeped in the mysteries of how letters form words right now and word spacing is crucial! I wrote about word spacing last year, but I focused on using InDesign’s secret keyboard shortcut. When you’re doing a whole book, you certainly can’t rely on the shortcut; you need to define the word spacing as part of the paragraph style. Fortunately, this isn’t hard to do…

One of the most common requests we see from InDesign users is “How do I do cross-references in InDesign?” Everyone assumes that x-refs must be really easy in a program as powerful as this, but unfortunately Adobe has not yet implemented this feature into the program. So here are a few options you should check […]