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If you want to set a vertical and horizontal guide along the edges of an object in Adobe InDesign, you normally find yourself dragging a guide out from the horizontal ruler, then another from the vertical ruler. Did you know you can save time by setting both guides at once? Let’s say your want to set guides, as I have in the image above, across the top and down the left side of a placed image. Hold down the Command key and click in the crosshairs icon where the two rulers meet at the top of your document. Drag out the dual guides to the top left of your image while still holding the Command key down, and release when they’re right where you want them. As you can see in the animated image above, the guides both appear right where I dragged them and I’ve saved myself another trip to the rulers!
Set vertical & horizontal guides at one time in Adobe InDesign
Getting the most from InDesign transparency
Long, long ago, Adobe gave us transparency in InDesign version 2. In each subsequent version of InDesign, Adobe has added ways to enhance documents with transparency, making it even more enticing. There’s one thing that hasn’t changed, however, and that’s the need to flatten transparency for output to a PostScript device. In the article InDesign Transparency: No Longer the Forbidden Fruit over at CreativePro, you’ll learn everything you need to know to produce a successful printed layout when you download the PDF excerpt from InDesign Magazine.
Outline fonts the right way in Adobe InDesign
Nothing ticks me off like receiving an InDesign document where the fonts have been outlined. What a waste. There’s really no reason to do it. Not only does it kill the quality of the text, often times making it appear bolder than the original font actually is, but you loose many features such as underlines, strikethroughs and more. Just embed the fonts in your PDF file. If your printer tells you that they need them outlined, tell them to bugger-off and start your search for a new printer – because the one you have sucks! If you simply must “outline” your fonts, you can “flatten” them instead and get much better results. David Blatner over at InDesignSecrets shows you how to convert text to outlines the right way.
Setting InDesign’s text wrap globally
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.
Aligning text baselines to InDesign document grids
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.
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.