*** From the Archives ***
This article is from August 1, 2012, and is no longer current.
Nominate Your Favorite Ridiculous InDesign Feature
I guess InDesign must be perfect, because despite our request in our latest podcast (episode 177) to email us your favorite “ridiculous feature,” we’ve barely received any. C’mon people! :D
Perhaps it’s because we didn’t get to the topic until about 25 minutes into the podcast, when I had to go answer the doorbell and David took over for a minute. Maybe people took that cue to also go answer their own doorbells while he prattled on about something or other? Heh. Well, he wasn’t talking about the winding number rule, folks, he announced that in our next podcast, we thought it would be illuminating (and fun) to trash talk InDesign a bit, and asked listeners to email us what they consider to be a ridiculous feature.
What exactly do we mean by a “ridiculous” feature? Something silly. Something useless. Something that InDesign offers that is kind of dumb or clunky, that you’d never use, that you don’t think anyone has ever used, actually.
Like maybe this?
Or this?
Or how about this?
Even icons are fair game … like, what’s with the Eye of Horus here? It’s creepy.
We have a few in mind, and Sandee Cohen just emailed us a good one in the Cell Options dialog box. But we want more!
We love the element of surprise, so it’d be great if you could email us your nomination(s) at [email protected], and then we’ll talk about them in the next podcast (episode 178, sometime in the first half of August), and people can bash them (or defend them) with comments in the Show Notes after. If you e-mail us, use the subject “Ridiculous!” so it’s easier for us to find.
But if you feel compelled to write about your favorite ridiculous feature in the comments below, be our guest. Just don’t be too mean, please, otherwise we’ll need to delete the comment! This is in the spirit of a good-natured ribbing of the program we all love.
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File > Quit
Why on Earth would you ever stop using InDesign;)
Footnotes of course.
YOU Americans who stick all the ! and ? don’t make ridiculous the Quarter space ;-) !!!
WE Europeans have sensitivity for nice typography and we populate our documents with zillion of hair spaces :-p
How about this: You can go to Story Editor Display Preferences (which does this need a whole section in Prefs anyway?) and set the Theme of your Story Editor display to Terminal so it looks like you’re back in the 1970s or 1980s.
Quarter space ridiculous!? Shame on you to say that!
Please remember, everyone, that one person’s “ridiculous” is another person’s “treasure”! Everyone uses InDesign differently. It’s like the old argument over the Navigator panel, which some people loved and others hated.
In this blog post, we don’t want to hear what you value… we want to hear what you think is insignificant.
I’m sorry if I’ve offended those who like to view a 80’s style Terminal view of the Story Editor. ;-)
I didn’t even know Story Editor offered themes. Now I’ve got the Terminal view. I’m into it.
I am curious when you would use a quarter space or third space, actually.
Quarter spaces are often used instead of thousand separators. Maybe not in the US, but in Australia and in Europe they are.
I use sixth spaces to see dead characters.
(BTW – this is a terrible job referring to the sixth sense)
FRITZ! rofl. Too funny. I got it, did not need the parenthetical.
Peter: Interesting! Did not know that. What did they use before InDesign? (Is there any other layout program that creates quarter spaces?)
Type > insert break character > return.
Well said James Fritz, Quit Indesign! Why/
Also a pain that shortcut it was deleted from my shortcuts after every reinstall.
Command A
Command Q
To close together, too many times I have gone for Select all just to have indesign quit on me, I never quit on it, just don’t understand indesigns fellings towards me and quitting when I need it!!
I’ve never seen any of my fellow Aussies use a Quarter Space as a thousands separator, but maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough.
What’s always bugged me is how, under Table Options, alternating strokes are on two separate tabs for columns and rows but the alternating fills are all together on one tab. Why the difference? Are strokes considered superior to fills and therefore entitled to an extra tab?
I’d nominate the Story panel (why dedicate a whole panel to ONE option ? Optical Margin Alignment could have been put somewhere else, I’m sure.)
Also the fact that the French version of CS5 did not get the Kuler panel. Because translating its contents was obviously such a bother.
But most of all : the Content Graber.
Most. Useless. Feature. EVER. I sincerely can’t for the life of me find a situation where I’m happy to have it over the Direct Selection tool.
To think of the development time and ressources that must have gone into this… GIZMO while so many things deserve more attention in ID makes me want to weep.
Content grabber, I second that! Always have it turned off, confuses newcomers to InDesign. Useless.
Content Grabber, don’t see the point. The ‘letter’ and ‘legal’ paper sizes, are these even used outside the US?
Has anyone used ‘Place from Buzzword’?
Open in Bridge – drives me crazy because it takes Bridge about 5 minutes to load up.
There’s 3 (or even more) on the InDesign layout. By the vertical scroll bar “Reveal in Bridge” in the File>Browse in Bridge and in the Application frame there’s an Icon for it.
I do try and turn these things off but they always come back when preferences are reset.. sigh.
Oh and that “CS LIVE” icon in the top right drives me crazy too.
Definately Shared Destination being checked by default. I work with a lot of links and that one makes me crazy. If I import a link from Word, it’s a shared destination by default and I can’t edit it. I have to start all over if I make it a URL.
Hmmm. The Content Grabber is definitely *not* useless! It lets you change an image’s crop without needing to toggle between the Selection and Direct Selection tools, indeed, without having to select the image object in the first place.
How often have people griped about not being able to see how much an image has been scaled without having to click in 12 places first? LOL … If you have the Content Grabber turned on, you can just tap that area (even if the image is not selected) and you immediately see the scale readout in the Control panel
THAT said, it drives me crazy too, and I always disable it. hahaha. I think if there were a preference that would prevent the Content Grabber from working unless I had the image selected first, I would use it much more often.
Kriss: Weird, I never noticed that.
But you can edit Shared Destinations – no need to redo them. In the Hyperlinks panel menu, choose Hyperlink Destination Options. Choose the Shared Destination you want to edit from the menu in the dialog, then use the Name and/or Destination fields to make your changes.
Sorry to stop this Ideal, but Indesign really not so perfect.
Some guy’s here would be upset, but there are many things that even MS word is better words processing in terms of ease of use.
I wish I could attach a file… So I will explain in words, here are some examples: in MS Word in the window “font” you can increase/decrease fonts size simultaneously for number of font sizes only by arrows. Simple marker button instead of long procedure in Indesign? and Bold feature even if you do not have the bold font.
And someone who works a lot with text, know how annoying it is!
Maybe in cs7, maybe?
Personally, I think that Adobe isn’t that good and Innovative like they used to be (before buying Macromedia).
we pay more for less in every new Version.
I wait for google software… Just Joking :)
I gave the Content Grabber a chance. The problem was it was too easy to move the image inside the frame when all you wanted to do was move the frame itself.
It’s not too much trouble to double click and select the image that way. Then double click to go back.
Perhaps they should add another handle to the side of the frames to toggle the content grabber
You need to hover over the content grabber to activate it, but when you move your mouse away from the grabber after grabbing you still need to double click to deactivate it. It would work a lot better if it turned itself back when you hover off the disc.
The third paragraph I had wrapped in sarcastic tags, but it was removed by the way the site works I guess :)
Content Grabber, Content Collector, the Deadly Color Picker of Doom, the Tool Hints Panel and Welcome Screen, the Box/Frame two tools for pretty much the same thing situation, Place From Buzzword, Export > Buzzword, the Sing Gaiji System (mainly because of its name, it’s like the Seetharaman Narayanan of InDesign), and maybe the fact that there is a checkbox that lets you deactivate “Use typographer’s quotes”.
Oh, and I also love the color names: “Lipstick”, “Fiesta”, “Grid Green”, “Cute Teal” and so on.
One thing that bugs the hell out of me is that weird Background Tasks panel cobbled together in something like Flash. Not only does it occasionally crash the application during exports, it looks strange and out of place, gives you no way to tell if the export is already done or hasn’t even started for fast exports since tasks simply disappear when they are over, has no “reveal exported file in finder” feature ? basically, it’s a bad version of a progress bar in the status bar. That panel would probably win “most ridiculous feature” for me. I can’t figure out why and how that thing could ever make it into a release the way it is.
Oh, and the good old “SVG” easter egg in the about box (which has been removed several versions ago). At least we still have Friendly Print Preset Alien, the butterflies and the LSD strokes.
I agree with the point about the Story Panel, that option should be a paragraph style attribute. It is annoying as hell having to set it up and/or check it for every single text frame known to man.
@Peter, very LOL. I love the reference to Seetharaman (see https://www.ironicsans.com/2006/09/interview_seetharaman_narayanan.html)
We’re going to have a blast on this next podcast.
Since some of the surprise seems to have been ruined, how about this: The shortcut key (I think it’s Ctrl-Alt-Shift) that sorts the menus into alphabetical order.
With all this talk about te content grabber I should point out that I wrote up a post about it last year. While I don’t personally use it, there is some useful functionality in it.
https://creativepro.com/taking-another-look-at-the-content-grabber.php
content grabber off; double click, adjust; double click again. No content grabber needed.
Buzzword… has it survived CS6… I mean, really? CS Review is gone but Buzzword is still here…? Geez…!
I have to agree that the traditional points/picas option is painful. I have one client whose compositors insist on using this setting, and it always results in at least three digits behind decimals in all of the measurements. You can never spec 12 pt. type; it ends up being 12.045 pt. I understand this is accurate for pre-digital type, but it seems like an unnecessary anachronism. I could be wrong.
MiniBridge. Totally unnecessary as you anyways need to open Big Bridge to at all use MiniBridge.
Window/Type & Tables/Story…
Couldn’t that have been included somewhere else instead of having it’s own little window with nothing else than settings of optical margin adjustments in it? That option would be easier to find if it was included elsewhere.
Gap tool
Eraser tool
Fancy corner option
Help ;)
Find Text.
I cannot stand the weird continuous looping around the entire document, the erratic behavior of Find Next, and the missing “Find Previous” button.
For such a pretty major function, its implementation is shoddy, half-hearted, and an embarrassment.
I agree with the Background Task ridiculous display. How can this be in the release? I can’t see anything.
The way Adobe want to force Bridge down my throat, i don’t want to use it. Stop putting it everywhere. Also i liked the default CS4 shortcut Option+CMD+O to chose the layer of a link. Why it is now Open in Bridge (and it’s true, Bridge takes an eternity to open).
Cross-references… when i update one, the other become modify. What is the deal with that? All my references are OK but when I replace a letter by another (that has nothing to do with any cross reference), they becomes modify.
I would also vote for a Find Previous button.
Like they said, Adobe listen to the InDesign users… well in fact, they listen to the CEO’s that buys the InDesign licenses (hence the presentation features that came first in the list of top features wanted in InDesign).
@ Jongware
Totally agree, the Find Previous has been a needed addition to the find replace for as long as indesign has been around.
My rant is that InDesign CS6 always opens in an almost maximized window. Have to start each session by down sizing the window. Wonder what prompted this change from the previous version and the rest of the Creative Suit applications.
How about the progress notices in the splash screen. OK, it is nice to know that it’s the helper applications being loaded, or sorting fonts or whatever, but it is totally useless information. If it fails, there is no telling if it was what it was working on or the one it didn’t get to (and what would I do with that information anyway?) If it is debug code, it should have been removed when it went to production. Why not just give us some sort of a start-finish progress bar/beachball/percentage or estimated time before it gives you the system so you can open the file and get to work? A dancing paperclip is as useful as the list of modules being loaded when you just want to edit a document.
My vote for ridiculous feature is: Preference | Display Performance | Vector Graphics. Since the Mac is vector graphics based why would you want to slow it down by not letting it display them in anything but high resolution.
@Doug: Display Performance is all about keeping things speedy, especially on slower computers. Here’s why the Vector Graphics is set to Proxy: Consider a magazine or newspaper that receives ads from ad agencies in PDF format and has to place 20 pdfs on each page. That would seriously slow down performance. But you can change that preference to be High Resolution by default if you want. That’s why I love preferences!
At what point wouldn?t I want to apply the same leading to the entire paragraph? And why isn?t this setting the default in InDesign?
At first glance:
Gap tool, no place in real work, nice to toy around and sketching.
Eraser Tool, well if you use a lot the pencil tool… but when several points need to get erased better used the Direct Selection tool, far more accurate.
Fancy corner shape, I am too shy to dare to use it ever.
Dan,
If you are on Windows you can control how the program is launched by right-clicking the icon you press to launch InDesign and choose properties and set the window to open how you’d like. I am not sure how this works on a Mac.
One feature that really bugs me is when you select multi lines (lets say .5 thick) and resize them with the Free Transform Tool.
If you enlarge them they stay at .5 but if you reduce the length of the line they will go thiner depending on how much you reduce the length by.
Hi, I have a message from Drop shadow effect:
“How a sub-function of the Effect Panel (I mean Gradient feather tool) could ever access to the VIP Tool panel? Isn’t it favoritism? Ridiculous! I was there before! “
@Frederick: Sometimes mathematics texts need extra leading between lines to set inline equations. Over the length of a full book, it could save a lot of space to sometimes adjust leading for a single line within a paragraph as opposed to setting an equation off on its own line like an extract. I agree same leading on all lines in the paragraph should clearly be the default behavior, but it’s also nice to have the option to change this for specialized uses.
@Anne-Marie: A quarter space is the house style for spacing between and around ellipses dots for one of my publishing clients. They prefer a more open mark than the standard ellipsis character provides. In the bad old days, I had to dedicate Quark’s flex width space to this. I love all of Indy’s spaces. I haven’t used a third space yet, but have used sixth spaces for spacing around slash marks or after footnote superiors. Never saw a dead character while I was doing it though.
The dialogue box that pops up after synchronization of booked documents:
“Synchronization completed successfully. Documents may have changed.”
Really, it might have changed? Gee, I hope so. Isn’t that the whole point to change the document and add styles, sync master pages, etc.?
How about that the cursor remains in the text where you were typing after you move the cursor away from the text box? When you later type a tool-selection shortcut letter, you insert that letter into your text “somewhere.” At least you can open copyeditor view, which focuses at the cursor location where you didn’t really mean to insert that letter.
One annoying feature for me is that almost every time I open someone’s InDesign file, the Frame Edges show up (View > Extras > Hide Frame Edges). I have to turn that off so I can focus on the design elements without that distraction. It may be helpful to some people but it’s something I just personally find unnecessary.
Voxann: This used to bother me too, until I learned to toggle ALL the guides with the W shortcut. That way I can preview my layout without distractions, and see edges when I need them.
I definitely nominate the Content Grabber. I instinctively use A to switch to the Direct Select tool when I want to alter an image’s position in its frame – which is rarely, because once I’ve placed it I’m usually happy with what I did.
Also, the hidden export progress. What gives?