Top 5 InDesign Template Tips

I’ve been producing layout files for my company and my clients for a couple decades now, and I can attest that starting with a workable template (as opposed to a blank page, or a copy of the previous issue or version) makes production go incredibly fast. However, I’ve found that, oh, about 98% of my clients don’t have templates to give me, and even if I create one for them, it’s a struggle to get them to use it. Believe me, I understand. People feel comfortable doing what they’ve always done. If you’re not a template user, I think you’ll find these five tips (there’s probably about 80 jammed in there) will help convince you it’s worth a try; and if you do use templates, I’m positive you’ll learn something new that will make them even easier and more useful for production.

 1. Make a Starter File Instead of a Template

I know the name alone—TEMPLATE—is an obstacle for many busy designers. Who has time to create a template for a complicated publication from scratch? New editorial is filling up your inbox, the photographer has a folder of images for the feature story, the client wants to see a first proof yesterday, you need to start producing right now. So you just open a previous issue,

Save As, and wade through old content as you bring in the new, like always. Let’s split the difference: make a “Starter File.” See how friendly that sounds? A Starter File is a copy of your existing publication file, cleaned up to receive new content and optimized to make production fast and accurate. Creating a Starter File for a repeated publication is just a little more work than what you’re doing now, but it will pay off tremendously in the future. Start like this: Grab one of the recent issues you’ve already published, and choose File > Save As. In the Save As dialog box, rename it to something like “White-Paper_Starter-File” or “Acme Textbook Series – Starter,” choose InDesign Template from the Format menu, and save it in a location outside of that issue’s production folder. TIP: The template format gives the file an INDT extension instead of INDD. You can still edit it while it’s open, but when you close and reopen it, InDesign creates a duplicate of the file called Untitled.indd. This is to prevent you from accidentally overwriting the original template—which is the point of a template, after all. If you want to edit a template or starter file after you’ve closed it, you can either choose the Open Original option from the bottom of the File > Open dialog box, or just Save As your Untitled document with the same name, choosing the InDesign Template format again in the Save As dialog box to give it the INDT extension.

Make Your Starter File Pristine

Practice safe setup and ensure that the document you’re using as a source for your Starter File is free of internal problems (often resulting from multiple Save As’s, version updates, and recovery from crashes in its past) before basing actual publications on it. Doing an IDML Roundtrip step early in the game will clear out any file corruption. Just save any changes you’ve made so far, export the file (File > Export), and choose InDesign Markup (IDML) from the Format menu. Now close the document, and open the IDML file you just exported from the File > Open menu. It opens as Untitled.indd. Save this file as an INDT, and continue prepping it for duty as a Starter File. Now, start pruning away the deadwood (Figure 1).

Open the following panels, and from their panel menus, choose Select All Unused, and then delete whatever gets selected:

• Paragraph Styles
• Character Styles
• Object Styles
• Swatches

Do that first, before you start deleting pages (with content); otherwise InDesign won’t find the styles you need being used anywhere, and so will include them in the “All Unused” selection. If you’re worried that you’ll be deleting something that you may want to use in the future, remember you can always retrieve it from that older file. Now go through the document and look for elements that take a while to format but that you use fairly regularly. These are things that don’t belong on a master page, since they don’t show up on every document page, but which every issue uses at least a few times. Sidebars, image and caption groups, styled tables, and standalone pull-quotes are good examples. Check to make sure the styles they use are “clean” (see the second tip, below), and then save out each element as a snippet (File > Export > InDesign Snippet) or drag it to a Library (File > New > Library or CC Library) to reuse in future issues (Figure 2).

Do a final mucking out: Delete all the old pages except for a few placeholder starter ones (the first page of a section, for example), and on the pages that are left, delete any objects or content in those objects that you’d delete anyway when bringing in new content for the next issue of the publication. Don’t forget to check the pasteboards for dust bunnies, and get rid of those too. This starter file probably contains links to image files that exist who knows where on your hard drive. To keep things organized, select all of them in the Links panel, and either embed them (Links panel menu > Embed Link), which saves the original images inside the file itself, or copy them all to the new location of the template (Links panel menu > Utilities > Copy Links To). That’s it! Save your changes and close the document. The next time you need to create a new issue or version of the publication, open your Starter-File.indt. You’ll have a fresh, untitled document with just the right styles and pages you need, and a library of already-formatted elements to bring in and customize for that issue.

TIP: Guides Be Gone

Ruler guides tend to clutter up existing documents, so it’s nice to clear those out from your Starter Files too. A quick way is to press Command+Shift+G or Ctrl+Shift+G, which selects all the ruler guides on the active spread, and then press the Delete key to get rid of them. You have to do this spread by spread, but if you’ve already deleted most of the document pages, it only takes a moment or two.

2. Clean Up Those Styles

“Format creep” happens to all of us. We start with the best of intentions, creating paragraph and character styles for all our text, applying them consistently. But in the throes of production, someone adds manual formatting, perhaps bumping up the text size of a caption, or changing the color of a drop cap. And from then on, you find yourself fiddling with the text size of every caption so it matches. Ack! Take some time to go through your starter file or template to see if it’s a Format Creep victim. With the Type tool, click inside a paragraph, and look at the Paragraph Styles panel. If you see a plus symbol following any of the style names (indicating manual formatting has been applied), and the same is true in most instances where that style has been applied, you’ve got a problem. This style is almost useless, since the purpose and benefit of the style—one-click formatting—is no longer doing its job. We’ll assume you like the look of the manual formatting. While your text cursor is still in the paragraph, choose Redefine Style from the Paragraph Styles panel menu. This adds the local formatting in the active paragraph to the style definition. Voilà! No more plusses, no more need to tediously apply manual formatting to text that already has a paragraph style applied. Do that for each of your paragraph styles. Banish the plusses! Note: If you encounter a plus because your cursor is inside a particular word that’s been formatted differently than the paragraph—say it’s bold or italic—then open the Character Styles panel and create a new character style from it. Once you apply the character style to the text, the paragraph style’s plus symbol will disappear. There is so much more you can do with your styles to streamline your templates—create based-on styles, set up Next styles, organize them in style groups, and create nested styles, for example. But simply deleting unused styles (as we did above) and updating your style definitions to use your actual formatting will save you a huge amount of time the next time you produce the publication.

TIP: A Script to Show Local Formatting

What’s faster than clicking inside text and looking for plusses in the style names? Using a script. I like IndiScript.com’s free cross-platform script, Show Local Formatting, which still works in CC 2015. It puts a red line over characters that have local formatting (meaning they need a character style) and a vertical line to the left of paragraphs with local formatting. As soon as you apply that character style or redefine that paragraph style, the markup disappears. The markup is non-printing, and you can toggle it on and off altogether by double-clicking the script. [Edit from Anne-Marie:  InDesign CC 2015.3 and later have a Style Override Highlighter button at the top of the Paragraph/Character Styles panels. No need for the script!]

3. Make Master Pages Do More Work

Useful templates have at least one master page holding essential page elements common to all (or most) pages, including margin and column guides, headers and footers, and automatic page numbers using the Current Page Number placeholder (Type > Insert Special Character > Marker). To make your template’s master pages even more useful, consider adding (or in some cases, removing) these elements:

Add Primary Text Frames (Figure 3) (or change your master page text frames to primary ones)

The beauty of primary text frames (introduced in CS6) is that they don’t have to be overridden on the document pages when you want to type in them, and if you need to apply a different master page to a document page that already has text in it, the text will seamlessly flow into the new master’s primary text frames. Also, if you have Smart Text Reflow enabled for primary text frames (this is the default setting in Preferences > Type), there’s no need to hold down modifier keys to autoflow your text—InDesign will flow it all in, adding pages as necessary.

Remove Elements

If your master page is full of placeholders that you always have to override on the document pages, like text frames with sample content or FPO images, you’re doing it wrong. The best practice is to only create objects on the master page that will seldom, if ever, need to be overridden and modified on the document page. Instead, whenever possible, use library items or snippets, discussed above, as your placeholders, bringing them onto the document pages as needed for those types of elements. They can remember their position on the page, too, if you use the Place command in the Library panel. Being strict with which objects you allow on master pages means you will be able to easily apply a different master to a page with content, or move a left-facing page to a right-facing page, without ending up with extraneous, overlapping elements.

Put Master Page Items on Layers

You can save a fair amount of fiddling if you just add one layer at the top of your Layers stack called Folios, and move your folio text frames there. This avoids the common problem of page numbers disappearing behind document page elements.

4. Create Three Object Styles

This tip is for those of you who never crack open the Object Styles panel. Why am I saying you should create three of them? Because using a feature (that’s new to you) at least three times will help you get used to it. Also, forcing yourself to add three object styles to your template or starter file will get you looking at your elements to imagine where object styles will become handy. As with paragraph and character styles, the reason to use object styles is threefold: fast one-click application of a combination of formatting commands, consistent and accurate formatting for particular types of objects, and easy format updating by editing the style, instead of all the objects themselves. Here are some great candidates for object styles:

• Image frames (stroke, shadow, text wrap, auto-fit [Object > Fitting > Frame Fitting Options > Auto Fit])
• Caption text frames (Figure 4) (paragraph style, text wrap, auto-resize)

• Photographer credit text frames (ditto)
• Callout lines (stroke color, stroke width, arrows)
• Pull-quote text frames (stroke, rule above/below, paragraph style, fill color)
• Jump line text frames (paragraph style, auto-resize)
• Repeated anchored objects (type of anchor, offsets)

Object styles are also easy to create. Just as with text styles, start by manually formatting an object and selecting it with the Selection tool, or just select an object that’s been formatted manually. Then open the Object Styles panel and create a new style by clicking the New Object Style button on the bottom or choosing the New Object Style command from the Object Styles panel menu. Don’t forget to apply the object style to the source object in your template, and to apply object styles to elements before you add them to your Library or export them as snippets.

5. Feed and Water Daily—or Monthly

Do you know why designers abandon the beautiful templates and starter files they created once upon a time? Because they let them die on the vine. You may have created the first issue or three from your template, but soon, that old INDT was out of date. Here’s the reality: when you’re laying out an actual publication, you tend to tweak and iterate and revise. Soon enough, the starter file you created earlier in the year doesn’t have all the goodies the most recent issues carry, like that new sidebar treatment you came up with, the updated style you’re using for pull quotes, the hyphenation tweaks you did for some paragraph styles. To keep your starter file healthy, periodically open it and update its styles, swatches, and master pages to sync with the latest version of your publication. One way to update the text styles is to open the template and import the styles (Paragraph Styles panel menu > Load All Text Styles) from the publication into the template. The default behavior is for the incoming style definition (the publication’s) to replace the destination, which is exactly what you want (Figure 5). For example, if you edited the type size, space above, and hyphenation settings for your Subhead style in the publication, the template’s Subhead style would get updated to match.

That’s the method to use if you want to cherry-pick updated and new styles, swatches, master pages, and other settings to copy from your publication to your template. A faster way to update the template, though, is to use the Book panel’s Synchronize feature. This will let you update the template with all of a given INDD file’s styles, swatches, master pages, cross-reference formats, variables, and more, with one click. (Well, you do need a little bit of set-up. Then it’s one-click.) Start by creating a new (temporary) “book:” Choose File > New > Book, and name the book file and save it. The new Book panel opens. If your template file has the official INDT template extension, open it and save it as regular INDD file, as INDT files can’t be added to the Book panel. Now, add your template’s INDD file and your most recent publication’s INDD file to the Book panel. Make sure the publication (not the template) is the Style Source by clicking in the empty square to the left of its name in the panel (Figure 6). From the Book panel menu, choose Synchronize Options, and review exactly what you want synchronized when you click the Synchronize button (Figure 7). By default, everything but master pages will be synced from the style source to the other document(s) in the Book panel, so turn on the checkbox for Master Pages. (This means that any edits you made to the publication’s masters, or new masters you added, will be copied over to the template’s.) Note that only additions or edits get synced, not deletions. That is, if you had deleted a swatch or master page from the style source document that currently exists in other book documents, and then choose Synchronize, the other documents will still retain those styles and master pages. You could view that as a feature or a bug; it’s up to you.

A Blueprint for Success

Still with me? Good—that means you’ve chosen to read this whole article instead of going to the gym or flossing. So I know you’re motivated. And the good news is that it probably took more time to read this than it would to implement one or more of these tips…so get out there and start making life easier on yourself!