Tired of setting your text wrap with each new object you create in Adobe InDesign? Much like setting colors or character styles globally, you can also set InDesign to always use your preferred text wrap method with new documents. To do so, close all your InDesign documents and open the text wrap panel. Set your preferred text wrap method by clicking on one of the wrap icons. Now, whenever you create a new document, the default text wrap you chose will be used for all objects. To restate the obvious, the new settings will only take effect in NEW InDesign documents.
Tagged: InDesign
Getting accurate colors when printing proofs from InDesign
In response to a reader question, David Blatner over at InDesign Secrets has offered some helpful tips and explanations regarding InDesign and getting accurate color proofs. On of my favorite tips from the article is to completely turn off Color Management in the print driver for your particular printer. Once you’ve done all the color management in Photoshop and InDesign, a printer driver can mess it all up. Turn that sucker off and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and headache.
Free LayoutZone tool for InDesign increases productivity
You’re working on a layout… you have some text and graphics, but you want someone else to work on them to save time. Now with LayoutZone, you can select those objects, choose Edit > Layout Zone > Objects to InDesign Document to convert them into an INDD file which replaces the original objects. At this point, you can give the new InDesign (.indd) file to another designer to work on while you continue to work in the original file. When they’re done, you can just click Update in the Links panel (to update the InDesign document). Or you can choose Edit > Layout Zone > Linked InDesign Page to Objects, to convert that person’s design back into editable pieces in InDesign. This is so much easier than InDesign’s built-in capability to “place” another InDesign file, because you can actually turn the placed file back into editable objects again. Read through the linked article, the download link is near the bottom.
Making dynamic text wrap permanent in Adobe InDesign
InDesign offers a number of ways to wrap text around objects. You can wrap around an entire object container, around the edges of your placed object, or even select an alpha channel (transparency) of a placed Photoshop file. It’s quite handy not having to draw another shape and fill it with "none" just to wrap text. However, Anne-Marie Concepcion at InDesign Secrets points out something you must watch-out for when using the transparency of a placed object to wrap your text, and how to quickly fix it, in this article titled Making dynamic text wraper permanent.
Set default character styles in Adobe InDesign
Many InDesign users know you can set the default colors displayed in the Color panel by setting them without a document open. I’ve recently realized that you can do the same thing with Character Styles. Open InDesign, but don’t open a document (that part is important). Now go to your Character or Paragraph Styles panel and set all your preferred styles like font choice, point size, kerning settings, indents & spacing and a keyboard shortcut. Now just hit OK to commit the settings to InDesign’s memory. From now on, whenever you start up InDesign and/or create a new document, those Character styles will already be set up and available.
Package Function not working in InDesign?
About a year or so ago I was experiencing a strange occurrence in regards to InDesign’s built-in Preflight/Package feature – normally I’d select the item from the menu and the dialog box would appear with all the pertaining options: 
But sometimes I’d be all set to get a file out the door, select ‘Preflight’ and nothing would happen. Well, ‘nothing’ unless you’re not counting the endless spinning of OSX’s ‘beachball’. No preflight box, no error message, nada – the whole program would simply lock up and I would have to Force-Quit & start over. This is not nearly as aggravating as it was under any OS prior to 10 or in most early versions of Quark. Adobe’s wonderful little autosave/crash recovery function has saved my bacon more than a few times these past few years. Anyway, when you’re dealing with a 20, 40 or 64-page document, pinpointing the cause of such a problem can resemble the old cliché about the needle and the haystack. When I first encountered the bug, I reverted back to my early production days and I began to eliminate pages from the document in hopes of narrowing things down. First I’d delete the first half of the document’s pages and try preflighting again. If I got the error once more, I’d know where my problem lied. If I *didn’t* get the error, I went back and deleted the 2nd half of the document’s pages and try again. And so on and so on until I was down to the one or two pages that were giving me the headache. I also employed this method when I’d receive the dreaded ‘postscript error’ on our office printer.
At the risk of sounding like one’s dad or grandfather, designers and production artists starting out today don’t know how rough us early Mac Quark users had it. I shake my fist at you damned CS3-right-out-of-college PUNKS!
So here I am in the process of deleting pages from my file and I happen to notice more than a few blank text boxes hanging out in the pasteboard area. Huh? Oh that’s right – I put these here for text overflow and forgot to delete them. *delete* *delete* *delete*…there, all done. Annoying, but those couldn’t have been the cause of the problem, could they? …could they?! The answer is *yes*, loyal readers – empty text boxes CAN cause a problem when left in the margins (or in some cases the actual document) and you need to preflight the file. I’m pretty sure this error only relates to text boxes that previously had copy in them – that is, if you used the box tool and created an empty frame on the pasteboard or on the live page, it wouldn’t repeat the problem. I haven’t had time to test my theory, but feel free to conduct your own experiments. Sure enough, about 99% of the time, the root of any preflight errors I’d encounter had everything to do with these rogue text boxes. Preflight would lock up the program, I’d restart & re-open the file, and sure enough there’d be one or two of these gremlins hanging out on the pasteboard. At the very least, they’re easy to spot – the real challenge is when those boxes are deep within your layout, buried under layers of text & graphics & placeholders. Ugh. Countless Google searches, forum posts and conversations with my colleagues failed to turn up a solution – it was only by trial & error (and a bit of luck) that I finally figured things out. Yay me, back to work now. *delete* *delete* *delete*
Keep layers intact when copy & pasting objects from one InDesign document to another
Moving objects from on InDesign document to another is as easy as drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste. But what about when your Indesign document contains items on multiple layers and you don’t want to lose them when you move the objects to another document? By default, InDesign merges all the objects when pasting in a new document onto the default layer. InDesign has a simple solution for this earth-shattering dilemma. Simply visit the Layers Panel flyout menu and select Paste Remember Layers. This will keep the objects you’re copying on their respective layers through the copy process.
InDesign’s hidden graphic replacement tool
One of the highly publicized features of InDesign CS3 is the ability to “load” more than one graphic when you use the Place command, showing you a small preview of each graphic as you place them.While the ability to place in a graphic frame our outside one is nothing new, you can hold down the Option key and click on a graphic frame which already contains a graphic and it will be replaced with the new graphic you currently have loaded to place.
InDesign’s Print dialog secrets
InDesign has a nifty feature built-in to the Print dialog box. The page proxy box in the bottom left corner of the dialog box can show you page dimensions and scaling info, as well as page offset, gap, image direction and more. Simply click on the page proxy to run through the different previews you see in the image at the right. Of course this isn’t a goldmine of super-valuable information, but it can come in handy, especially for those who do a lot of printing on in-house high-end printers. Often times I hit print, make all my settings and then forget the page size of my document and have to exit the Print dialog just to check the size of the document to make sure it will print without scaling, etc.
Moving facing pages to get rid of the orphan first & last page in Adobe InDesign
A reader recently contacted me with an issue he was facing with regards to a booklet he was working on that was setup as Facing Pages in document setup. His issue was that in his 8-page document, page 1 and page 8 stood alone as single pages, while 2-7 were spreads. Whatever he tried, he couldn’t move page 8 in the Pages panel to the left of page 1 where it would appear when printed. This makes it quite difficult to print mockups, or create crossover images on the front and back cover. 
While this behavior is “normal” for InDesign (and Quark) and is no problem for commercial printing, some people simply want to see it on screen as it will appear when printed. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to “fix” this issue. With the 8-page document open and set to facing pages, your Pages panel will look like the image to the right. Page 1 stands alone, 2-7 are spreads, and page 8 stands alone. To make a mockup on your own printer, you want page 8 to appear just to the left of page 1 – which will allow you to stick pages 8/1 to the back of pages 2/7 and pages 3/4 to the back of pages 5/6, fold them in half and put them together just as they would appear when printed. Simply moving the pages as is will do nothing but change the page order in your document, but leave page 1 and page 8 as stand alone pages. Not exactly what you’re looking to do. 
To fix the problem, simply uncheck the Allow Pages to Shuffle item in the Pages panel flyout menu as seen above. 
With that done, you can now selectively move pages 1 and/or 8 (or whatever the first and last page numbers are in your document) to their rightful place in the Page order to allow you to print them the way you want (see the image at left). The hitch? You’re probably going to have to adjust the auto page numbering options if you have your pages set to auto-number. But this is a simple task and can make life easier when printing proofs. While I explained to the reader why this InDesign feature works the way it does, I completely forgot to tell him how he can get around it. Hopefully he’s still reading here and will find the solution he was looking for. Sorry man, my bad!