InDesign

A quick tip, but handy nonetheless. When you are applying styles in InDesign, many times you want to edit the style slightly but not actually apply it. But what to do when you already have text selected? Normally you would deselect the text (otherwise double clicking on the style to edit it would apply the style to the selected text), double click on the style in the Styles palette, make your changes, re-select all your text, and move on. That's a lot of work for a small change.

CreativeBits is not a "press-release" type of site, but I thought this was interesting enough to mention to our InDesign CS users out there:

InTips is a "tip of the day" plug-in that helps both novice and experienced InDesign users learn to use the program more efficiently.

Sometimes you want to copy a page you've created in Adobe InDesign to another document. Most people would do a select all, copy, switch to the other document and past in place. This is fine, except that it's a lot of back & forth work.

Next time, try dragging the page icon from the first document's Pages palette to the new document's window - The entire page will be copied in place (except for Master Page items)

To follow up on THIS TIP about drag & drop with InDesign – You can copy an Adobe Illustrator object from AI and paste it right into ID which makes it an InDesign object where you can color it, give it a stroke, or further adjust the bezier curves. ID will not however accept objects with a gradient, it just removes the gradient when you paste the path into your document. You just need to make sure that you have a few preferences set correctly.

Did you know that you can drag any file ID can place normally right from an application, or the finder?

If you have a folder full of images and text, select them all and drag them to an open ID window. Wherever your mouse is when you let go, that's where ID will start displaying the images/text (it will cascade them down the page). As you are dragging the files from the finder, you should notice a ghosted icon for each file over the ID window as you drag it around.

InDesign offers a lot of features for graphic designers, many of which are completely missing from Quark XPress. One of those features is ACCURATE high resolution graphic display of images in your documents. Unfortunately, the more graphics you add, the slower InDesign becomes to work in. One easy way to put a little kick back into ID is to adjust the display prefs of the document you're working in.