More Often Than Not, Changing InDesign Defaults

Pariah Burke

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While collaborating on the book Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs, Anne-Marie wrote the following in an edition of her “DesignGeek” enewsletter: “To see ‘Blatner, David’ appear on my caller ID…was like seeing ‘Einstein, Albert’ was calling me…well if you’re a Quark or Adobe geek, that’s how it felt!”

Man, can I relate to that feeling! Here I am, contributing to the site run by David Einstein and Anne-Marie Copernicus, writing next to Sandee da Vinci, Steve Edison, and Michael Hawking. It is my great honor and equally great humility to contribute the following InDesign tip to InDesignSecrets.com, the first of many.

Hyphenation is on by default, but optical margin alignment is off. So are most OpenType features, paragraph spacing, and a bunch of other options that you might use in your work more often than not.

And that’s the key phrase–more often than not. If you need something on more often than you need it off, and InDesign turns it off by default (or vice versa), change InDesign’s default behavior. It’s simple, and eliminating any repetitive steps in your workflow increases productivity.

Start by launching InDesign and ensuring that all documents are closed. Now, on the various palettes, set the options you typically need.

If most of the objects you create need to have text wrap, pop open the Text Wrap palette, choose the wrap type, and define the outsets. If you don’t want everything you type to hyphenate automatically, turn off that option on the Paragraph palette. Underwhelmed by faux small caps that are 70% of their normal size? That one’s in the Preferences (Mac: InDesign > Preferences > Advanced Type [Windows: Edit > Preferences > Advanced Type]). Prefer optical margin alignment? You’ll find that on the oft-forgotten Story palette.

Any palette, menu, or preferences option that is not greyed out with all documents closed can be altered such that what you set is the default for all new documents. Thus, if you change the faux small cap size to 85%, every new document you create with faux small caps will draw them at 85% of the cap height instead of the default 70%.

Of course, any pre-existing documents have their own document-level preferences that will be unaffected by the new settings, but all new documents you create will use your updated settings.

Once you’ve changed the defaults, close InDesign to commit them to the preferences. See Dave Saunders’s comment below about why this particular step is important.