The Graphic Mac: Apple | Adobe | Design - InDesign

Selectively override InDesign Master Page items

James — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:36:13 -0700

InDesign's Master Pages are quite powerful, and make long documents easy to keep consistent. They do have their difficulties though when you try to alter items that are contained on the Master Pages themselves.

The easy fix is to select all the pages you want to alter the Master Page items on in the Pages panel (Shift + Click to select more than one, or Command + Click to select noncontiguous pages), then select Override All Master Page Items from the Pages panel flyout menu.

Stop InDesign from converting graphic frames to text frames

James — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:33:14 -0700

A feature I love about InDesign is the ability to click any graphic frame with the text tool and begin typing in it immediately. However, not everyone likes their graphic frames converted to a text frame automatically.

For those who wish to turn the feature off, simply visit your InDesign preferences (Command + K) and select Type in the source list on the left. Then uncheck the box labeled "Type Tool Converts Frames to Text Frames."

Working with Document Tabs in Adobe CS4 Apps

James — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:29:25 -0600

With the release of the Adobe Creative Suite 4, all the major apps have adopted a tabbed document interface. At first it's a bit difficult to get used to, but I've found it to be a pretty decent productivity increase. The one thing that baffled me was how difficult it was to get objects from one document to another. I of course am not one for reading manuals, so it took me a while to figure out how simple it really is.

You can drag objects (or entire layers for that matter) from one document to another when they're both open simply by selecting the object(s) or layer(s) from one document and dragging them to the tab of the second document and hovering them over the tab for a brief second. The second document moves to the front and you can let go of them to place them.

Remove stroke or fill from your Adobe InDesign object with one key

James — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:58:53 -0600

If you have an InDesign object such as a text box, or an image frame in your document and you wish to remove any stroke and fill it currently has, you can do it with a quick keystroke. Simply select the object in question and hit the Slash key ( / ). This will set either the fill or stroke to None, depending on which you have active at the time. To remove the color from the other attribute, just hit the X key to switch and hit the slash key again.

Easily compare 2 InDesign documents for changes

James — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:00:36 -0600

Here's the problem: You have two InDesign documents of the same job which are filled with text - but you don't know which one to use. You could spend a lot of time reading page after page of text trying to determine which document is the one you want, but there's an easier way.

I picked-up this tip from Anne-Marie Concepción over at InDesign Magazine some time ago and it's fantastic for comparing two InDesign documents to find the differences. Obviously, this tip is most useful for documents containing a LOT of text. Read on to see how easy it is.

Quickly replace photos & graphics in your InDesign document

James — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:37:09 -0600

InDesign offers a plethora of ways to place new photos and graphics into your document. Adobe has also made it simple to replace an existing image or graphic with a new one.

To replace an existing photo or graphic, simply hit Command + D (Place) and choose your image as normal. But when you're ready to replace the existing image, hold down the Option key and click the photo or graphic you wish to replace. The new image will be placed inside the original image container.

This is especially useful when you load your Place cursor with more than one image at a time to replace several existing images.

If you only wish to replace a single photo or graphic, simply select the existing image first, then go through the normal method of placing an image.

Image-placing shortcuts in Adobe InDesign

James — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:44:02 -0600

One of the things I love about Adobe InDesign is that there’s usually more than one way to accomplish virtually any task. Take placing images in your document. InDesign offers a plethora of options to improve productivity in this area, thanks to keyboard shortcuts.

In my Image-placing shortcuts in Adobe InDesign article at Macworld's Creative Notes blog, I show you some handy shortcuts for placing single and multiple images into your document using InDesign.

Free InDesign style sheet template

James — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:09:22 -0600

If you have a long text document to format and aren't quite familiar with setting up Style Sheets in Adobe InDesign, this free pre-made Style Sheet template is just for you.

The template is based on an OpenType mix of two fonts fonts (Meta Serif/Sans Pro), but can easily be changed to another pair of fonts.

Besides directly using modifying the styles, exploring the file will give you some great ideas of how to achieve different looks through the use of paragraph and character styles.

The download includes the following styles and more:

Semantically named paragraph and character styles
3 subheading levels, with and without automatic numbering
Bullet and numbered lists in 2 levels
Paragraph with and without indents
Drop cap paragraph
Quote
Table style
Text box styles
Caption
Text formatting styles
Footnote layout

The article from InDesigning.net explains how to load and use the styles in your InDesign document, as well as provides a PDF file showing off the styles in a sample document. The document was created in InDesign CS4, and is quite handy because it saves you the time of setting up a style sheet from scratch - allowing you to simply edit an existing one.