InDesign Tips

Got paragraph and character styles you use frequently? Maybe you took our advice and created basic, global character styles for bold, italic, bold-italic, and regular…

Using the Package feature of InDesign (File > Package) is the ideal way to close out a document…

With the new single column Tools panel in InDesign CS3, the separate buttons for Preview and Normal modes have become one button…

Opening the Underline Options in InDesign means showing the Character palette/panel and selecting Underline Options from that panel’s flyout menu. It’s not very convenient or expediant…

Ever want to resize text as well as the frame? Of course you do, from time to time…

Sometimes you know the name of a command but just can’t seem to find it in the menu. Conveniently (quirkily?) InDesign allows you to re-order menu commands alphabetically…

Need to remove a text frame here and there without completely breaking the thread? Just delete the unwanted frame(s)…

To unthread text frames without deleting the frames themselves, double-click the out port on the first frame (or the last frame you want to remain threaded in the story)…

Not a fan of the light gray preview background? Change it…

Selecting individual table cells can be a challenge for even the most nimble-wristed “Halo” master…

One of the really nice things about InDesign is its liberal policy of undo/redo. It invites experimentation…

A frequent question is: How do I import or place one InDesign document into another to combine them?
Excellent question, but you don’t start from import or place…

Yesterday we learned that, when a text frame is grouped with other objects and scaled, InDesign reflects both the original and scaled size of the type in the Font Size field…

Have you ever seen two values in the Font Size field—one embraced by parentheses? It could read something like “50 pt(24.85)”…

When you first show the Character palette, the Font Family field is selected, with its contents highlighted…

When trying to achieve a clean edge on the type in your paragraph, one must push the opening punctuation (typically an open-quote) beyond the vertical visual line of alignment–make the puncutuation “hang”…

When you create column guides in either the New Document or Margins and Columns dialogs, InDesign evenly distributes the columns between the left and right or inside and outside margins, resulting in symmetrical columns…

Rotating, skewing, resizing. These are common tasks. When you must transform multiple objects the same way, say, scaling a page of image frames up to specific X and Y dimensions, it can be tedious…

Scaling type horizontally with the appropriate field on the Character or Control palettes is easy and precise, but not necessarily ideal when trying to scale to fit a particular space or when a more visual scaling is desired…

Drop caps–those big, attention-getting glyphs that arrest the eye and bring it right into the beginning of your story–are a quick and simple thing to achieve in InDesign…