Ten (Very) Quick Tips for InDesign Users!

Still using the old Quark trick of creating a new text frame on the pasteboard to hold overflow text?.

Stop now and get to know one of InDesign's most overlooked features—the Story Editor. Accessed with the keyboard shortcut of cmd/ctrl+y or via the Edit > Edit in Story Editor command, the Story Editor is simple text editor for InDesign stories.

For those unaware, overset text is any text that will not fit in it's text frame and is indicated by the red + in the lower right corner of the frame:

That's only partially helpful, because knowing there's overset text doesn't tell you how much there is. The story editor on the other hand will show you everything you need to know:

You can make any edits you need directly in the story editor and they'll be applied to your document.

With a text frame selected, InDesign's swatch panel, by default, will target the frame, not the text.

This is just fine if you want to fill the frame or perhaps add a stroke, but what happens when you want to change the color of the text? Many people will switch to the type tool, select all of the text and then choose the appropriate color.

You already know this isn't necessary or it wouldn't be in this list. So, what's the secret? With the frame selected, press the J key. Press it again to toggle back to the frame.

Speaking of swatches, how often have you filled an object when you really intended to stroke it? Rather than undo it, use the keyboard shortcut of shift +x to switch the stroke color to the fill and the fill to the stroke.

I know what you're thinking...another swatch tip? Yes, but keep in mind how often you're using swatches in your documents and you'll see why these are so high on my list. With that out of the way, here's my final swatch tip.

Say you have an object selected and you want to apply a swatch to the stroke. Rather than moving to the swatches panel to double click the stroke proxy, just press the x key. And of course, if you press it again it will toggle it back to targeting the fill.

As the name implies, this feature is designed to quickly apply styles or access menu commands. Press cmd/ctrl+enter to launch Quick Apply and start typing the style or menu command you want. Once you've gotten to it, just hit enter and you're done.

The default for Quick Apply is to include menu commands and styles...but that's easily customized as shown by the following screenshot:

Because InDesign style keyboard shortcuts must be created and applied using the number keypad, Quick Apply is particularly helpful to MacBook users. These machines have no number pad to access which eliminates that method of applying the shortcuts.

So you're looking at your document on screen and about all you see is frame edges, guides and mess on the pasteboard. You'd love to get a better idea of what it will look like and don't want to waste paper or take the time to export a PDF.

No problem!

Just press the w key to enter preview mode. Magically, InDesign will hide all the guides, gray out the pasteboard and hide all of the frame edges.

Bonus tip: By pressing and holding the Preview icon in the tool box, you can choose among the several preview modes, including bleed, slug or the new CS5 presentation mode.

Note: make sure you don't have the type tool active and in a text frame at the time or you'll just type a w.

Anything that can be done manually in InDesign can be scripted, that is, automated. The real beauty of this is that you don't have to know a thing about writing the code for a script. About the only thing you need to know how to do is copy/paste a script into the proper folder in the InDesign application folder.

To give you an idea of the power of scripts, InDesign ships with a number of them already installed. Open the Scripts Panel using the Window > Utilities > Scripts command and have a look through the sample scripts.

The script names are fairly descriptive and do things ranging from placing multi-page PDFs to creating character styles from manually styled text.

There a multitude of sites on the web offering free or inexpensive scripts. Have a look at my tips page for a few of my favorites.

Any field in InDesign that contains a measurement such as height, width or location on the page is capable of simple math. For example, you have an object that's 2.27 inches wide and you want it to be twice a large. Just insert your cursor in the field and add *2.

Press enter and InDesign does the math and changes the value to 4.54 inches.

Be aware, that simple math means just that. Only one math function can be done at a time.

If you're zoomed way in or out on a page and want a fast way to fit the spread to the window, double click the hand tool. To zoom to 100% double click the zoom tool.

How's that for quick?

Do you know how many ways there are to create guides? Let's take a look three of the easiest.

1. Double click any point on a ruler to create a guide.

2. Drag a guide from a ruler to add a guide to a page. Ctrl/Cmd+drag to have the guide applied to a spread. Hold the shift key while dragging to snap the guides to the ruler marks.

3. Use the Layout > Create Guides command. This will allow you to easily create a grid.

As an added attraction, by selecting Remove Existing Ruler Guides you can use the Create Guides dialog to remove guides as well as create them.