Setting a Few Preferences

For our first project, these few suggestions on how to configure InDesign will do, but I have many more than are on these next few pages.

The full discussion about customizing InDesign can be found in the first chapter of the Compendium, “Workspaces & Preferences.” Or you can save that for later and be content with these few customizations.

When to Set Preferences

To ensure that these preferences are set consistently for all the documents we create during this course, be sure to set them with no documents open at all. Many of the preferences are document-specific, but there’s no way to distinguish them from those that are global (application-wide and applied to all documents).

General

• To make our user experience as pleasant as possible, let’s adjust our Preferences. It’s quick and easy to get to this page of the Preferences: On a Mac, use the InDesign CC menu, on Windows go to Edit > Preferences. Or use the somewhat unintuitive shortcut ⌘-K/Ctrl-K.

Show “Start” Workspace When No Documents are Open This choice shows recent files, links to videos, etc., when no documents are open. Sometimes this is convenient. At other times, I wish to see my chosen workspace (the panels I have carefully arranged) whether documents are open or not. This ambivalence leads me to enable and disable this preference with some frequency. Luckily, it’s quick and easy to get to this page of the Preferences. For now, let’s disable it.

Content-Aware Fit If you prefer to make your own cropping and composition decisions, I recommend disabling this as a default.

Interface

This book makes extensive use of screenshots (pictures of my screen while using InDesign). To make these as legible as possible, I’m going to make InDesign’s user interface a little less dark and murky. So that we both have similar experiences, you may wish to do the same.

Color Theme This doesn’t actually have to do with colors at all; rather, it adjusts the lightness of the panels that surround your document window. I’m choosing the lightest option for two reasons: I find the small interface elements more legible both on screen and in the printed version of this book. Also, I do print my work, and the lightest interface presents a context that is more like holding printed material before one’s eyes. Nonetheless, you should choose what suits your eyes best.

Options

When scrolling with the Hand tool or moving or resizing objects, I prefer to see an accurate rendition of my layout. Thus:

Hand Tool I suggest No Greeking for now. And what is Greeking? It’s a placeholding approximation of images or text, usually boxes with X’s in them for images and lines to represent text.

Live Screen Drawing Choose Immediate so that as you drag objects across the page or resize them, you will know the result of that edit before you release the mouse. This is especially great when resizing text frames.

Type

Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs I can think of very few instances in which I need to adjust leading on a character-by-character basis. This preference is document-specific, so I recommend setting it with no document open so it’s in effect for all future documents.

Smart Text Reflow Although we won’t need this for a while, I wanted to mention this powerful feature. If you place a 14-page Word document into a one-page InDesign document, InDesign can add the necessary pages at the end of a story automatically. Upon editing that text, you may no longer need as many pages, and InDesign can delete extraneous pages automatically as well.

Units & Increments

Ruler Units Note that your horizontal and vertical units of measurement can be different, and can be changed at anytime by right clicking on either ruler in the document window.

Display Performance

Note the word “performance.” These settings can enhance or degrade the speed with which InDesign displays text and images. The print quality of your document is not affected by these settings at all.

Default View There are three choices. Fast doesn’t display images at all, but instead shows gray boxes or shapes—rather brutal. By default, Typical shows a low-resolution “proxy” that InDesign generates for each image. High Quality renders images, graphics, and anything transparent without compromise. For the documents we will use during this course, we may use High Quality without much penalty. However, more complex documents will become sluggish unless you reduce the display performance view.

Adjust View Settings You may customize the view settings to better tune the performance of InDesign. For example, you may want to adjust Typical to have low-quality transparency but high-quality vector graphics (AI and PDF files, for example) so your company’s logo will look splendid when your boss sees it, and leave raster images (those made of pixels) as a proxy.

GPU Performance (if present)

To better control zooming to specific objects, I recommend disabling Animated Zoom. I will assume this function is off when we discuss zooming and panning in later lessons.