Comments on: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About InDesign Preferences and Presets.

By: Bret Perry

Bret Perry — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:00:02 +0000

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/

By: Libby Cowan

Libby Cowan — Sat, 30 May 2009 23:09:41 +0000

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.

By: Bret Perry

Bret Perry — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:54:37 +0000

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.

By: Bret Perry

Bret Perry — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:31:14 +0000

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.

By: Ani

Ani — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:27:35 +0000

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?

By: Bob Bringhurst

Bob Bringhurst — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:32:13 +0000

Excellent. I linked to this from the Help topic:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d21a.html

By: Christopher

Christopher — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:54:26 +0000

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.

By: Mike Witherell

Mike Witherell — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:46:49 +0000

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

By: Christopher

Christopher — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:49:10 +0000

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?

By: Mike Witherell

Mike Witherell — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:34:47 +0000

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