20 Obscure Features
This article appeared in Issue 118 of InDesign Magazine.David Blatner shares his favorite 20 obscure features that every InDesign users should know about.
For the past 15 years, Anne-Marie Concepción and I have explored the nooks and crannies of Adobe InDesign in a segment called “Obscure Feature of the Week” in our InDesignSecrets podcast. It began almost as a joke, assigning so much importance to seemingly unimportant features, so we added a fake echo effect, drawing out the name to “…the week-eek-eek-eek!” But we quickly realized, along with the podcast audience, that the obscure features are not just fun to learn about, but they help us use the tool more effectively. As we like to say, “the more you know, the better it gets.”
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David, you wrote: ‘I wish we could get a Barbell cursor on the normal document page!’ Have you logged this as feature request? I would vote for it.
“Last Line Right Indent: you’ll find the last line can extend past the right margin.”
Yeah, and that’s a real pain. This is why I prefer to set two tabs between entry and page number in my TOC settings. First one left aligned, based on the right indent value, second one right aligned on column.
Notice that in rare cases an issue may occur that breaks the tabs and messes the layout. A non breaking Grep style applied to tabs fixes it.
If I have monthly IDD subscription does that make me a Premium member?
Regarding “View Threshold,” this did not work for me. When I changed the value, my guides did not function as described, and when I saved, closed, and reopened the document, the value was reset to 5%. Even when changing it again to 50% or 75%, the guides in my document remained visible at all zoom settings. What am I missing?
Surely the ultimate hidden feature in InDesign is ‘gridify’ and all its wonderful permutations. :-) It’s not in the menus, not in a panel, not in any dialog, not in the Preferences, there’s no button or toggle, it can’t be hidden or revealed – it’s nowhere to be seen in the program. Even searching for ‘gridify’ in Adobe Help leads you nowhere in particular. You just have to know about it. :-)
Another interesting feature is the subscript/superscript settings found in preferences!