February 6 2009 • 10:12 AM
By:
Bob Levine
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About InDesign Preferences and Presets.
I often see questions about various preferences and presets in InDesign. It might be about printing, PDF exports, workspaces or any of the myriad choices in InDesign.
I answered such a question about preferences in the InDesign user to user forum yesterday and Mike Witherell of JetSet Communications was kind enough to jump in with a link to an excellent PDF that he has posted on his website which dives into 22 different preferences and presets for CS3 and CS4.
The document details the location of preference and preset files on both Mac and Windows along with advice on how to handle each. This one’s worth keeping around for easy reference.
It can be viewed and downloaded from here.
Great summarization – thanks a lot!
Wonderful, thanks!
This is a great resource.
Alex
The only thing missing is any mention of InDesign’s caches, which can become corrupt and need to be purged manully. They are stored here:
Mac:
~/Library/Caches/Adobe InDesign/Version 5.0/(or 6.0 for CS4)Win XP:
Documents and Settings\[user account]\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\Version 5.0\(or 6.0 for CS4)This is most excellently handy!
FYI, linked PDF appears blank in Safari for 10.4 so you’ll have to download and read in Acrobat…
Wackily, this PDF crashes Preview as soon as I try to move to a new page or scroll [OS X 10.5.6, Preview 4.1]. Works fine in Acrobat Pro — and it’s great to have all this information compiled on one easy to access resource. Fabulous work, Mike!
Hello everyone,
I’m glad you like the report. I have a fun question for you, though:
Have I found ALL the presets, or are there more?! With a program as big as InDesign, I’m never really sure!
Best to you all,
Mike Witherell
What’s the best way to copy ALL of my preferences to bring them over to a different machine? Is there an easier way than saving each of the pref files individually?
Christopher,
That is the point of the report. By putting them all in one folder, it is easier to back it all up at once. Not easy. But easiER.
Mike Witherell
K…tyvm… I surmised as much, but I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a magic “copy all of my preferences” button somewhere that I was missing.
Excellent. I linked to this from the Help topic:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d21a.html
This list is great!
Re: #7 Creating a new stroke style…
Does anyone know how to create a new SOLID STROKE style? My preferred stroke weight is 0.3 and I always have to set that manually. It would be great to add it to my list of preset strokes. OR… some way to maintain 0.3 as my preference weight in the strokes. Any ideas?
Cool. I manage 50 Macs running InDesign and we want all to have the same preferences. We don’t copy preference files, but use applescript because…
We had been copying the preference files from my Mac to all the others, but were having corruption issues and apparently, according to Adobe support, copying preference files between (different) computers is NOT a good idea. You also copy things like references to “missing” dictionaries, font info, and other things that are specific to YOUR mac.
Various “errors”, ID crashes, prefs “dissappearing” features not working… Anyone else have this issue?
I wrote an applescript that sets our desired prefs, without copying the preference files themselves… it does seem to have helped eliminate crashes and errors… I’d be happy t share if there is any interest.
Interesting… doesn’t seem to be a pref for default stroke.
You could create an Object Style, Object Style Panel, new style, style options… turn off all options but stroke and stroke & corner options.
Then be sure you are clicked on that style when you draw.
Bret,
I would be very interested in sharing your script to set InDesign preferences. I have 20 macs that we are upgrading very soon and I need all of them to be set with the same preferences.
As a scripting-challenged, script-borrowing manager of artists and designers without the luxury of time to learn how to write my own scripts, I was amused by the InDesign Help that referred busy designers to the Scripting Guide on the InDesign DVD so that they could develop a script to set the preferences, and then have all users in the group run the script on their computers. I could manually set the preferences on all the macs in much less time than I could figure out how to write a script to do it.
Any help you or anyone else could send my way to speed the set up of the macs would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Libby,
So sorry I just happened to look at this thread now and see your post 2-1/2 years later! Hopefully you solved it by now.
For those who haven’t, my script is probably too customized for anyone else to use without modification.
But if you don’t script, you could buy David Blatner’s great tools, which has a preference resetter called “Remember”: http://dtptools.com/product.asp?id=blid
Or try a this free one, mentioned elsewhere on IDSecrets:
http://in-tools.com/article/scripts-blog/preference-manager-script/