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InDesign Nightmares

Terrifying tales of the evil that lurks in some InDesign files, and how to survive it

David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion

Boo! Did we scare you? If not, then maybe this will: “a long document with no paragraph styles applied.” If you’re an InDesign power user, you probably got chills down your spine when you read that, right? We have all seen scary InDesign documents—pages that were created by well-meaning but not-well-versed InDesign users… files built by designers who don’t understand production techniques… or publications pieced together by a large committee of people who each have a different way of working. It’s not pretty, and it’s certainly not fun when one of those files gets dropped on your virtual desktop. So this article is for everyone who makes InDesign files, in hopes that it will help you avoid these pitfalls. And it’s also for all the InDesign users who receive these kinds of files, to help you fix those problems and turn those nightmares into sweet dreams. Here are some of the scariest InDesign scenarios we’ve seen. You have been warned!

Spooky Style Stuff

The most common horror story in InDesign involves paragraph, character, and object styles—not using them, using them inconsistently, or using them in a way that actually gets in your way. Too many local overrides A “local override” is formatting applied on top of a paragraph style. So if a paragraph style is set to the Minion Pro font and you select a word and change it to Helvetica, that’s a local override. When you place your text cursor in some text that has a local override, you’ll see a + symbol in the Paragraph Styles panel; and if you hover over the style name, you’ll see what formatting has been dropped on it (Figure 1).

Figure 1: You’ll see the details of both paragraph and character level overrides when <!--more-- srcset=


you put your cursor over the + symbol next to a style name in the Paragraph Styles panel.” width=”618″ height=”598″ /> Figure 1: You’ll see the details of both paragraph and character level overrides when you put your cursor over the + symbol next to a style name in the Paragraph Styles panel.

So, it’s good when everywhere you click in a story the Paragraph Styles panel shows a name of a style… but it’s bad when there’s always a plus symbol after it! A little bit of local formatting (for example, applying italic or bold to a word or phrase) is often okay, but when you have local formatting across whole paragraphs, it makes updating or maintaining consistency a nightmare! Instead, if you need your text to look different, it’s better to redefine your paragraph style, or create and apply new paragraph styles. Then use character styles when formatting individual words or sentences inside a paragraph. When you find local formatting everywhere, the best way to get rid of the local overrides is to select all the text and then click the Clear Overrides button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. That strips every paragraph back down to its base paragraph style formatting. If you need to keep some formatting (such as italic or bold words) but get rid of most of the other formatting, be sure you apply character styles first. See this article for detailed instructions. Character styles applied to entire paragraphs Do a quick check: Open your Character Styles panel… do you see styles that share the same name as your paragraph styles, like Body, Subhead, and Caption? Yikes, that’s scary! You should never apply a character style to an entire paragraph—that’s what paragraph styles are for! If you use character styles like this—swiping over full paragraphs of text and applying a character style on top of the already applied paragraph style—you’re needlessly making your work much harder on yourself. Instead, use the Paragraph Styles panel to specify all paragraph and character formatting to text. The most common character style that should be applied to text in any InDesign document is [None], which is the starting point. The only time you need to create a new character style and apply it is when you have a subset of text—a word, a phrase, a bullet or number, or something like that—which needs to be formatted differently than what the paragraph style specifies. To clear out erroneous character styles, select the paragraphs that have a character style applied, and apply the [None] style in the Character Styles panel. Alternatively, you can simply delete the character style in the panel—if you get a prompt asking if InDesign should retain the formatting, tick the checkbox so it does. You end up with a paragraph style that has local overrides. You can select that style and choose Redefine Style from the Paragraph Styles panel menu to make the override go away (Figure 2). See the post Don’t Apply Character Styles to an Entire Paragraph for details.
Figure 2: From the Paragraph Styles panel menu, choose Redefine Style to incorporate local overrides into the style definition.

Figure 2: From the Paragraph Styles panel menu, choose Redefine Style to incorporate local overrides into the style definition.

Pages of Pain

Did you hear the story of the InDesign user who put every object on a new layer (see Issue 89)? That’s not evil, but it is extremely inefficient. (We approve of using layers, of course, but normally you’d want to put all the text frames on one layer, all the images on another, or some other grouping like that.) Here are a few other really inefficient or problematic ways that people lay out pages. Single page spreads When your publication has facing pages (where most spreads are made from a left- and right-page, also known as verso and recto), those should be two separate pages in your InDesign document—not both on the same InDesign page! Merging pages together like this can cause terrible problems later when people (such as your commercial printer) need to pull them apart. If you need the two pages to print on the same sheet of paper, you can place the individual pages next to each other in the Pages panel, and then turn on the Spreads checkbox in the Print or Export as PDF dialog box to force the pages to print together (Figure 3).

Figure 3: If you need adjacent pages to appear together in a printout, choose Spreads in the General print options.

Figure 3: If you need adjacent pages to appear together in a printout, choose Spreads in the General print options.

(If you want the first two pages of a facing-pages document to form a two-page spread, set the page number of the first page to an even number.) Items that cross spreads Technically, there’s nothing wrong with extending a single object from a left-hand page to a right-hand page, spanning a spread. But in reality, this can cause great headaches and frustration. The problem is that a single object that spans a spread really only “belongs” to one of the two pages: the page that contains the center-point of the object. So if your pages reshuffle or have to be split apart for some reason, the object won’t split properly. For example, let’s say you create a page element that extends across pages 2 and 3 on a spread. Then later in the production cycle, someone adds a new first page to the document. Now page 2 becomes page 3, and suddenly what was a spread is no longer a spread. That page element show shows up on page 2 or 3, but not both (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Page items that span spreads are potential problems if your pagination changes.

Figure 4: Page items that span spreads are potential problems if your pagination changes.

Here’s another example: some people put a single text frame on their master page spread that includes headers for both pages. This becomes trouble when your verso and recto document pages need different master pages! So, in general, it’s good to keep your InDesign documents flexible by ensuring that objects that need to be on both sides of a spread are actually duplicated—that is, you have one object on the left hand page and one on the right. No bleed Usually when things around you start to bleed, that’s a bad thing—and a sure sign you’ve been transported into a cheesy horror movie. But one of the worst sins of page-layout production is not bleeding objects off the page properly—that is, extending objects to the edge of the page but not past it. If your objects aren’t supposed to touch the edge of the page, you don’t have to worry about bleed; or if you’re creating onscreen, interactive documents you can ignore bleed. But if you’re sending your file to a commercial printer and you want a background color or image to extend to the edge of the page, you need to go past the edge by at least 9 pt (.125 inches, or 3 mm). And then, when you export a PDF, you must also include that bleed area in the Marks and Bleeds section of the Export PDF dialog box—or else your bleed area won’t get included, defeating the purpose (Figure 5).
Figure 5: When exporting a PDF for print, you must select document bleed settings, or the bleed you added to your InDesign document will not be included in the PDF.

Figure 5: When exporting a PDF for print, you must select document bleed settings, or the bleed you added to your InDesign document will not be included in the PDF.

Warning: The built-in PDF presets do not turn this on for you; you have to do it yourself. When your document has no bleed, your printer will either send it back to you or painstakingly create a bleed for you (which often doesn’t work well). Ignoring the Page Size Setting Some InDesign users have “page size blindness” and blithely accept InDesign’s default suggestion of a Letter or (in Europe) A4 size page for every project, regardless of the actual page size (technically, “trim size”) of the final product. When they lay out a business card or postcard, for example, they’ll create a new letter-size document, and then drag out a frame of the proper final size inside it, adding all their content inside the frame. Then they add hand-hewn crop marks indicating where the printer is supposed to cut. Stop doing this—you’re scaring us! Instead, take advantage of the Page Size fields in the New Document dialog box. The numbers you enter here should be the final trim size of the document… 3″ wide by 2″ tall, for example, for a US business card. If you’re not sure of the trim size, ask your commercial printer. If you entered the wrong measure, you can change the trim size from File > Document Setup, or with the Page tool, but be prepared to adjust the positions of any objects you’ve already added. When your document page size is the same as the final trim size, InDesign can include crop marks and other trim marks automatically when you print it or export it to PDF. But don’t assume your printer wants those marks—see Claudia McCue’s article “The New Rules of Printing” for more details on how to get your print job right.

Terrifying Text

Everyone has seen design nightmares, where someone has used six different fonts somewhat randomly on the same page, or squeezed or stretched fonts in unnatural ways. And we’re not going to get into aesthetics here—if you want to make ugly-looking pages, that’s your business. However, we do care a lot about what you do to your fonts and text in InDesign. For example, if you’ve ever selected a whole paragraph and applied baseline shift to move it up or down, consider your hand severed, er, slapped! Baseline shift should be applied only to one or two characters at a time, for things like superscript or subscript styling. Here are a couple of other text-based nightmares we see: Outlined Text Sooner or later, someone is going to tell you to convert all your text to outlines. Maybe it’s a printer who insists they can’t print your document unless you do, or maybe it’s some well-meaning manager who thinks you should do it before archiving the file. We encourage you to just say “no.” Converting all your text to outlines (using Type > Create Outlines) is truly an InDesign nightmare. Of course, once you convert text to outlines, even the smallest edits are difficult. But lots of people don’t realize that many features are lost when converted to outlines, including underlines, strikethroughs, Rule Above/Below, and all automatic bullets and numbering. Ack! Of course, converting a single character or word to outlines for some special effect is fine. But don’t do it to large amounts of text! Instead, you can find a good trick for converting text to outlines in your PDF in this article. Unembeddable fonts Just because you see a font in your menu doesn’t mean you should use it, no matter how cool it appears. For example, we have a font called “Krungthep” on our computer, which looks a lot like the old “Chicago” font. But there’s a hidden problem with this font: It is unembeddable. That means there’s a protection setting in it which stops it from being embedded in PDF or even EPS files! That can cause a lot of problems if you want to make a file to send to someone else to output. When you use protected, unembeddable fonts, it means either everyone who receives your PDF has to have the same font as you, or you have to convert the text to outlines before you send it. (And you know how we feel about that.) We strongly suggest avoiding these kinds of protected fonts. You can tell if a font is protected by applying it to some text, choosing Type > Find Font, clicking the font, and then clicking the More Info button. Or, you can create a custom preflight profile that checks for protected fonts (Figure 6).

Figure 6: A custom preflight profile can help you head off big problems with unembeddable fonts.

Figure 6: A custom preflight profile can help you head off big problems with unembeddable fonts.

Icky Images

Preventing and fixing problems with text is only half the battle. You need to stick to best practices to avoid nightmarish issues with images too. Here are four of the most common reasons why images wreak havoc in InDesign workflows. Pasted images InDesign was designed to be very flexible in how you work, even allowing you to do things you probably shouldn’t. For example, you can copy images from Photoshop (or your web browser, or pretty much anywhere) and paste them onto your InDesign pages. But do yourself and everyone around you a favor and… don’t do it! There are several problems with pasting pixels into InDesign. First, these images won’t show up in the Links panel, so not only can you not track them inside your document, but you can’t retrieve information about them (such as resolution). Second, pasted images cannot reliably be color managed, so you get whatever color InDesign guesses is right. Third, they can bloat your InDesign document horribly—if you copy and paste a 20 MB image from Photoshop, your InDesign file becomes 20 MB larger. And finally, you might not be able to get the image out to edit it again. Note that we’re not talking about vector images from Illustrator (which, when you paste them, will generally convert into editable InDesign objects). As long as the vector paths are relatively simple, copying and pasting them isn’t that bad. But pasted bitmapped images should make you shudder. If you need a bitmapped image to travel with your document (rather than being a linked file on disk), place it, select it in the Links panel, and then choose Embed from the Links panel menu (Figure 7). That is much safer and more reliable!

Figure 7: Embedding a raster image is always preferable to pasting into your InDesign layout.

Figure 7: Embedding a raster image is always preferable to pasting into your InDesign layout.

Images converted to CMYK It’s so tragic when designers make decisions too soon. For example, far too many people convert their images from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop before placing them in InDesign. This can quickly turn into a nightmare if you find you picked the wrong CMYK, or if you suddenly realize you need the RGB versions for an on-screen document and can no longer find them. Most designers don’t realize that there are many different CMYKs, and they just convert everything to the default “U.S. Web Coated SWOP v2” (which is a very “blah” low-quality CMYK). But once you convert to a CMYK, you can’t get the great color back—it’s gone! Instead, it’s much safer to place RGB images directly into InDesign, and then let InDesign convert them to CMYK when you’re making the PDF—and when you know exactly which CMYK you should be using. (Your printer can tell you.) Or, better yet, if your printer will accept a PDF/X4 file (ask them), then send them that, and they’ll do the conversion to CMYK for you, which will always be better than what you could do. To learn more about the RGB to CMYK process, see this article at InDesignSecrets, and this one from CreativePro. Hidden images It is possible to import images and “lose” them in the layout, resulting in inexplicably large PDFs, accidental show-throughs on the press, slowdowns in printing and exporting, or even crashes. For example, you might place an image, and then hide it (on purpose or not) via Object > Hide or toggling off the Visibility icon in the Layers panel, or just cover it with another object. Or, in one technique we’ve seen, some users will place a large image file and then crop it tightly so that only a tiny portion is visible (Figure 8). Then they might even duplicate that graphic frame multiple times and crop it differently, to view various parts of the full image. We’ve seen many a file brought to its knees because this was done with intricate EPS or AI files dozens of times in the same file.
Figure 8: This tightly-cropped image contains a lot more than meets the eye. You can see the entire image if you click and hold on it with the Direct Selection tool (below).

Figure 8: The tightly-cropped image (top) contains a lot more than meets the eye. You can see the entire image if you click and hold on it with the Direct Selection tool (bottom).

The best practice is to isolate the art in its own Illustrator or Photoshop file first, and then place that single image in InDesign. (Alternatively, set each piece of art on its own artboard and bring each artboard in separately.) Effects in Photoshop In the 1990s, many designers learned to build special effects (such as drop shadows, glows, or transparency) in Photoshop because it was the only way to do it. Even gradients (blends) were done in Photoshop because you’d get a better, more reliable effect. But here’s the problem: the technology has changed over time, and some designers haven’t. And while there’s nothing technically wrong with doing all that work in Photoshop, it’s just not efficient! These days, productivity is just as important as quality—and you can have both if you use InDesign. InDesign’s Effects panel lets you apply drop shadows, glows, and many other transparency effects to text and objects. You can even apply an effect to the text in a frame separately from frame itself (Figure 9).
Figure 9: You can apply independent transparency effects at several different levels of a text frame: Object, Stroke, Fill, and Text.

Figure 9: You can apply independent transparency effects at several different levels of a text frame: Object, Stroke, Fill, and Text.

Similarly, InDesign’s Gradient panel lets you fine-tune beautiful vignettes as strokes or fills of any object, or even text. So you don’t need to create these in Photoshop. For those who insist they don’t print as well from InDesign, we say: You’re either using a really outdated RIP in your printer, you’re not setting up your print workflow properly, or you were burned by problems a decade or more ago and you haven’t tried again since. It’s time to jump into the second decade of the 21st century and use InDesign’s tools to the fullest!

Taming the Beasts

As an InDesign user, you may encounter any number of other nightmares—or perhaps create them yourself! We’ve seen our fair share, such as people typing page numbers manually on each page of a long document because they didn’t understand how InDesign’s automatic page numbering worked. Or the book in which every page contained a separate, unthreaded text frame full of text because the designer didn’t understand how to thread two text frames together. Or the designer who didn’t know you could set a negative first line indent, so made “hanging bullets” by breaking every line into its own paragraph and inserting tabs. These are all painful—and scary!—real life scenarios. And sooner or later, unless you create all your documents yourself, you’ll likely run into them. When it happens, take a deep breath, don’t panic. You don’t need crosses, garlic, or silver bullets to ward off these monsters. You just need to use the proper InDesign techniques, and your files will live happily ever after.

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  1. Michael
    June 19, 2024

    I have a file appropriately laid out in spreads. When I deleted a blank page, rather than shifting pages to fill in that gap, the spread remains with only one page. How do I fix this?
    I thought “allow shuffling pages” would fix this but, no.

    Reply
    1. David Blatner
      June 19, 2024

      My first thought is that one of the pages might have a Section start on it… is there a little triangle above the page in the Pages panel?

      Reply
  2. Ann Farr
    October 6, 2023

    I’m at my wits’ end. I’ve spend two whole days trying to correct this book. I have 14 parts to it: i-xiii and then 14-148. I had to send the publisher a proof the day before yesterday, but it won’t export correctly to pdf. Pages i-17 are fine in the pdf but after that it changes the running headers and footers from recto to verso and versa vice.

    I’ve been setting books since 2008 for this publisher and never ever seen this problem before. I’ve idml-ed, reset prefs, been through every master page to see if all’s correct etc. etc. several times. No good.

    InD 16.4 running on Mac OS Mojave.

    Please can anyone help? I’d be so happy to hear from you.

    Reply
    1. Mike Rankin
      October 7, 2023

      Hi Ann- Are you saying that everything appears okay in InDesign but the parent page elements like headers and footers get reversed only in the PDF?

      Reply
  3. Marc Dunker
    November 29, 2022

    Several things come to mind for me. Entire documents created in Layer 1 are at the top of my list. Rarely have I seen Paragraph Styles or even Parent Pages used. I recently created several brochures from two designers. All of these issues were present. I’ve also dealt with Photoshop files with hundreds of layers (none named) with no organization. No groups, layer comps, artboards, etc.

    Reply
  4. Petar Petrenko
    October 28, 2022

    What about entering fullstops in TOC between Headings and page numbers instead of Tabs? :)

    Reply
    1. David Blatner
      October 30, 2022

      Oh wow… OUCH! :-)

      Reply
  5. Mike Rankin
    October 27, 2016

    Haha, no worries! We do make mistakes from time to time. Thanks for being a subscriber!

    Reply
  6. Marshall Ostrow
    October 27, 2016

    Terrifying tales do not lurks, but they do lurk.

    Even though I’m a retired technical writer and editor, I still cannot overlook such errors in print.

    Marshall Ostrow

    Reply
    1. Mike Rankin
      October 27, 2016

      Hi Marshall- It’s the evil that lurks, not the tales.

      Reply
      1. Marshall Ostrow
        October 27, 2016

        The secret is out. Old age aside, now you know why I am retired!

  7. Jon. Hersh
    October 13, 2016

    I notice that there is some difficulty with the formatting of this article. It looks like quite a few of the paragraphs have lead-in sentences with no punctuation! I imagine that they should have been BOLD FACED to make them stand out as a kind of in-paragraph header. It would have been simple with Character Styles but they don’t cross over to HTML, do they? :-)

    Reply
    1. Mike Rankin
      October 13, 2016

      Hi Jon- Thanks for pointing that out. It was due to a tagging error on my part and a quirk in WordPress where it looks like bold is applied in the backend but it doesn’t come across in the published article.

      Reply
  8. Anne-Marie Concepcion
    October 12, 2016

    Ha! Scott. What would you prefer instead of Basic Paragraph? I think it just used to be [None} or similar.

    Reply
    1. Petar Petrenko
      October 28, 2022

      It can be set up as Body Text style (maybe?) and when you place a text for a book you have 90% of your job done?

      Reply
  9. Scott Falkner
    October 12, 2016

    Didn’t read (cheapskate), but I home you included my most hated InDesign “feature” introduced in, I think, CS2. Basic Paragraph. That’s just a trap waiting to pounce on the experienced and the novice alike. I fantasize it will disappear in CC2017, but it’s in the beta, so I guess I have to keep sacrificing thumbdrives to my local volcano.

    Reply
  10. Anne-Marie Concepcion
    October 12, 2016

    Whoa Eugene! That’s a nightmare story for sure.

    And yes … I have seen the horror of faux tables.

    Reply
  11. Eugene Tyson
    October 12, 2016

    And I think one that missed the cut this time around! Tables! When you receive a document that has lots of tables. You think that’s great! Then open the artwork file (indesign file) only to find some chutzpah has created a table by inserting lines, frames and text frames manually to construct a table, rather than use the Table feature!

    Reply
    1. Jim Leonardson
      October 13, 2016

      I’ve had a similar experience. I was working for a studio that got a series of ads from an internationally renowned ad agency and having to rebuild a table made of rules with cell content was made of individual frames.

      Reply
    2. David Blatner
      October 12, 2016

      Eugene, it’s funny you should mention that… just this morning I opened a file that someone sent me and they had used a table… but the vertical strokes between the columns were created using lines sitting on top of the table. Wow.

      BTW, I think auto-correct may have changed some other word to “chutzpah”? If we’re looking for yiddish words, sounds like that person was a shlemiel or a shmendrik. :-)

      Reply
  12. Eugene Tyson
    October 12, 2016

    I once spent weeks setting up a 3,200 page technical book that had 4 different running heads per spread, using the running head variables, hours of grep searches to apply the correct style to be picked up by the variables, to outsource the book for changes, then get it all back with all the running heads inserted manually, for the entire 3,200 page book.

    Weeks of work down the drain. Onward and upwards!

    Reply
    1. Christine Rivela
      October 20, 2016

      Hi Eugene,

      Speaking of running heads and variables…..may i ask how you were able to automate the running heads using a GREP?

      My problem: we have autonumbered heads that need to appear in the running head (different ears for recto/verso pages….2 levels of heads: verso, 1st on page; recto, last on page) but i have not been able to find a way for the autonumbering to be picked up in the variable. The only possible solution i was able to find was a plug-in called powerheaders but i have been having trouble utilizing that as well.

      Is there any way to do this in CS6 without a plugin?

      Thank you!!!!!!

      Reply
      1. Obi-wan Kenobi
        October 20, 2016

        I can give you a solution that works for $1!

      2. Christine Rivela
        October 20, 2016

        i tried to do it by applying a character style to the autonumbered heads but it is still not picking it up in the running head for some reason….it seems like it should be pretty simple so i wonder if im missing something.

        (https://creativepro.com/secret-life-of-character-styles-and-running-headers.php)

        :D

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