Preferences You Must Change in InDesign

Chad Chelius

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This article appeared in Issue 143 of InDesign Magazine.

Changing InDesign’s defaults is a must for the sake of efficiency and convenience.

When’s the last time you reviewed your InDesign preferences? Not just to tweak a specific setting, but to review all the settings that affect your documents? They’re called preferences for a reason: They give you options to fine-tune the way InDesign looks and acts. The fact that they exist at all is an acknowledgment from the folks at Adobe that no two InDesign users are exactly alike.

Let’s start with a simple example. You probably know that by default when you create a new document for print in InDesign, the unit of measurement you start out with is picas. If you’re not a fan of picas the first thing you probably do after creating a document is switch the unit of measurement to inches, millimeters, or whatever units you prefer. Now think about how many documents you create in a year’s time and multiply that by the time it takes to switch your unit of measurement each time, and you’ve wasted quite a bit of time! This is exactly where preferences come into play. They give us the ability to change InDesign’s behavior to make our lives easier. I’m here to tell you about the key preferences in InDesign that you must change to help you work more efficiently in your day-to-day work.

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