For most all users of Adobe InDesign CS3 since updating to OSX Leopard, using the "Hide" feature, either via the InDesign menu item, Command + H, or Option + clicking on the desktop or other application window, results in the inability to get InDesign back as the foreground application. This leaves you with no other alternative but to force quit InDesign. Thankfully there is a fix available that works on every Mac I've tried it on.

1. Go into your User/Library/Caches/Adobe InDesign folder and move the contents to your desktop. For most, this will be a single folder called "Version 5.0" which contains several files.
2. Relaunch InDesign and the Hide option should work.
3. Once you've tested the Hide option via one of the methods above, and are satisfied that all is working normal with InDesign, delete the original "Version 5.0" folder from your desktop.

None of your InDesign preferences should have changed, so you should be good to go at this point.

If you work for a large publication, or even a large design firm, you may be familiar with Adobe InCopy as part of your InDesign workflow. If that is the case, you've probably noticed the lack of coverage in the mainstream blogs & sites around the Web.

Thankfully, the publishers of InDesignSecrets have launched a new site called InCopySecrets and it's loaded with tips, tricks, tutorials and more for users of Adobe InCopy. There's also a few general InDesign tips tossed in there, so it's worth checking out even if you don't use InCopy.

Every InDesign power user knows the best way to be really efficient in this program is to use keyboard shortcuts. But finding and changing shortcuts can be frustrating. No longer!

The Keyboard Shortcuts plug-in was designed by David Blatner and DTP Tools to help you find and assign shortcuts quickly and easily. It is free of charge and works with InDesign and InCopy CS3. Note that both Mac OS and Windows versions are available.

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.

Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel has a great explanation of Adobe InDesign's overlooked and underused Align First Line Only to Grid feature.

While aligning text to document grids sounds techy, overrated and downright boring, trust me when I tell you that this feature can save you a lot of time when you're designing books, training manuals and magazines. I love tips like this, but they do take a while to burn them into your memory for frequent use in your day-to-day work.

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.

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.

PageControl 2.0 has been released for Adobe InDesign CS, CS 2 and CS3. The plug-in lets you create different page sizes and both vertical and horizontal spreads inside one InDesign document. One page could be Letter and another page could be Tabloid, and next one could be the size of a business card. Inserts, foldout and even spines can now be part of the same document file.

I love this plugin!

"I have an issue with drop shadows and spot colors in Adobe InDesign. When I use a drop shadow in front of a spot color background it looks fine in InDesign, and prints properly as spot color separations. But a white box shows up around the image in Acrobat when I make a PDF to show the client. Is there a way around this problem?"

An excellent question, and one that comes up a lot for designers working with spot color. There are several ways to make sure your spot color jobs preview properly in Adobe Acrobat.

My friends over at CreativeTechs have the scoop on avoiding the white box around shadows 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.

When you have a lot of text selected which you have kerned and/or tracked out and you simply want to reset all of it to zero, you can either go to the tracking and kerning input boxes in the Control Bar and do it manually, or you can do it the easy way.

With all your text selected, simply hit Command (Apple) + Option + Q. All your kerning will return to normal. Don't you just love keyboard shortcuts! This works in Adobe CS2 and CS3.

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.

By accident I just found out that InDesign has a feature called Snippets which allows you to drag virtually anything, like a group of objects, off the page and onto the desktop and it gets saved as a .inds file (a Snippet). This file can then be dragged back into, or placed via the Command + D shortcut, any other InDesign document as though it were an image or text file with all the formatting in place (text is still editable). Pretty cool!

Tim Cole authors one of the many Adobe Blogs available called Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel.

The entire blog is fantastic, but two posts caught my eye recently regarding InDesign CS3 and Leopard.

The first post sheds light on 3 issues:

1. You can't "hide" InDesign under Leoard
2. There's a problem copying vector objects FROM InDesign TO Illustrator
3. Crashes when invoking dialog boxes for save, open, export, etc.

While no solutions are offered, Tim does let us know that Adobe is aware of the problem, and is working with Apple to resolve the issue.

The second post dives a little deeper into problem #3.

For the record, I also experience the inability to hide InDesign. You simply can't do it, except under certain circumstances which I can't nail down. But even then, once hidden I can't get it to unhide, and must force quit it.

I don't experience any crashes with dialog boxes, but I use DefaultFolder and I wonder if that somehow is a "workaround" for the issue.

In my line of work, it's all about deadlines and how fast you can meet them – that's why whenever I can streamline my workflow, you bet I'll do it. I'm all about Transmit 'droplets', 'Watched Folders' and most importantly, I love my print presets in Adobe InDesign.

Since I'm constantly printing drafts of documents for editors to review, I required a way to quickly output those jobs with certain specs on specific printers without having to configure those variables every single time in the Print menu.