Top 10 InDesign Secrets of 2015

Mike Rankin David Blatner

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What an incredible year for InDesign it has been! No matter what flavor of InDesign CC or CS you use, we have published over 200 new articles for you this year, containing hundreds of tips, tricks, videos, and more. You can find our full archive here, but I’m guessing that you’d probably rather focus in on the most important, coolest, most awesome articles… am I right?

OK, let’s get to it. We’ll start with 10 stupendous and useful InDesign “secrets”—and then, as you’ll see, we won’t be able to stop there… (The following are in no particular order! Just click the title to jump to the article.)

Apply Character Style [None] with a Keyboard Shortcut

If you use character styles (and, if you don’t, you should!) you know that one of the biggest annoyances is when you have to go back and set a character style to None. Fortunately, Anne-Marie explains in this article how to assign a shortcut to None!

Three Ways to Improve Your Hyperlinks

You’re probably already making your InDesign documents suitable for print and digital (so that you can, for example, put a PDF up on a web site), so you’re making hyperlinks right? Keith Gilbert provides three super-easy tips to make those hyperlinks work better than ever.

Creating Live Captions With Auto-Fit Transparency Effects

The coolest InDesign techniques come when someone finds a way to combine several features together in a way that no one has done before. That’s what Mike did in this article about putting captions above images. It’s surprisingly simple and elegant!

Work Faster with Long Documents

Are you working with a big ol’ document, or perhaps even multiple documents held together in a book? Alan Gilbertson has had plenty of experience with this, and he shares a few lesser-known tips you really need to know about.

What Do the Default Sample Scripts Do in InDesign?

InDesign ships with a bunch of ready-made scripts that you should be using today! But where are they and what do they do? We explain it all for you in this article that lists all the important scripts, including MakeGrid, SortParagraphs, and more.

Dynamic Pull Quotes

Pull quotes are easy to make, but they’re often hard to standardize or “templatize”—that is, make a quote that can be put in at template or library. Masood Ahmad figure out a clever solution using tables that you should consider using in your workflow.

The Swatch Panel’s Stealth Feature

Last year Adobe snuck a couple of new features into InDesign CC which most people don’t know about: an eyedropper and hex field into the Color Swatch dialog box. They’re confusing at first, but Alan easy once you read Alan’s explanation.

Troubleshooting Data Merge Errors

I’ve been doing Data Merge for over a decade and I was still amazed at the incredible resource that Colin Flashman created in this article: a list of baffling errors that you may run into (and, more importantly, some great suggestions to fix them). This is a must read for any data-merger.

A Clever Trick for Making Custom Arrowheads

Everyone who has ever added an arrow to the end of a path in InDesign has wished they could create custom arrows (or other shapes). Well, with this clever and surprisingly straightforward trick from Linda Bergeron Szefer, you can! Try it today.

How to Add a Rule Around a Paragraph

This was a surprise hit at The InDesign Conference in Denver this year… the ability to draw a border around a paragraph, and even have it break across columns! Keith Gilbert presented it for the first time there, and then followed up with this article detailing how to do it.

Best Articles About Scripts and Utility Apps

It’s impossible to stop at just 10 great articles… there are just too many more that you should see. If you missed these six posts about scripts and utilities, you just have to read them!

• How to Find the Font That Has the Glyph You Need
• Making Page Numbers as Words Instead of Numbers
• How to Magnify Your Screen Display
• Creating Dropwords with InDesign
• How to Save InDesign Files as Layered Photoshop Files
• A Script to Show Options for Placed Files

Important Articles About InDesign Upgrades

Finally, here are three more that we can’t help but include: one about what is new in InDesign CC, one a warning that every CC user needs to read, and finally one just for fun:

• InDesign CC 2015 Now Available: Shading, Graphic Cells, and More
• Read This Before Installing InDesign CC 2015
• News Release: Adobe InDesign Goes All-in with iOS, Drops Support for Mac and Windows (notice the publish date on this one before you take it too seriously)

Well, that’s it! We hope you’ve enjoyed this roundup of some of the best InDesign tips and tricks this year. Of course, stay tuned… next year will be even more InDesign Secrets!