Timeless Treasures in InDesign

In the game-design world, one of the mantras is: “Simple to learn, difficult to master.” A well-designed game can usually be picked up quickly, but years down the road, you’re still trying new strategies and adapting to the other players around the table. And that’s InDesign for you: a tool (game) that is evolving on a yearly basis for our jobs (players) that are also continually evolving. How can we claim mastery of it? If you skipped over one or more updates in the last 10 years, you may have never learned about one or more of the features introduced in it.  Does your copy of InDesign contain hidden treasure and secrets to unlock? I guarantee it. And even better: some of these treasures are even more valuable when combined! Let’s go back in time. Bring a few documents along, but nothing too valuable—treasure hunting is risky business.

Object Styles

I hope that by now you’ve discovered object styles! They are the number one tool for quickly formatting objects, both text and images. The Object Styles panel is found under Window > Object Styles, and works much like the Paragraph Styles panel. To start experimenting with it, open one of your existing documents, select an object with some formatting, and choose New Object Style from the panel’s flyout menu. Give the new style a name, and click OK. You can then create a brand-new object and apply the newly-created object style to it, and you’ll see that much of the formatting has come alone for the ride. With your new object style applied, double-click its name in the Object Styles panel to open the Object Style Options dialog box. Select the Preview checkbox in the bottom-left corner, and explore the options! Many of these options have obvious visual

effects on components of your document, such as fill, stroke, effects, columns, insets, and text wrap. You certainly know what these do—you’ve just never applied them so quickly before! When it comes to naming your object styles, think about what the object actually is or does, not what it looks like. It’s tempting to use names like “Blue Sidebar” or “Anchored Yellow Example”—but if the design changes, you’ll be left with names that are unhelpful or misleading. So give your styles functional names: “Sidebar” and “Anchored Example” are better! CS2 also introduced the Next Style functionality, which allows you to logically chain paragraph styles together. An object style containing a paragraph style and the Apply Next Style option will allow you to quickly format sidebars that contain multiple styles (Figure 1).

Object styles have a lot more subtle uses, as well. There are three sets of export options that will be applied when exporting to PDF or EPUB/HTML, and the Story Options section contains the critical Optical Margin Alignment option. Finally, one of the best object style features is Auto-Size Options, which will grow or shrink your objects when you add or remove text. See issue 47 for the details of working with Auto-Size (and all the other new features in CS6). Object styles will speed up your proto-typing and document production, and as an added bonus they’ll help you keep your documents more consistent.

What don’t object styles do?

Sadly, the treasure you have found isn’t perfect: you can’t apply dimensions or locations yet. So you can’t use a style to set all objects to default to a particular size or  location on the page. Object styles also can’t be used to place an image inside the object. Want even more tips and tricks for using object styles? Check out David Blatner’s article “Get in the Fast Lane With Object Styles,” in issue 40.

Live Preflight

I love big documents and eschew InDesign’s “book” feature as generally creating more trouble than it’s worth. But as documents get larger and more complex, proofing them manually gets less and less reliable. If only we had a powerful machine that could automate much of it! Oh—did you think I meant that we didn’t have such a tool? We do; it’s called Live Preflight. Live Preflight lives under Window > Output > Preflight, and you can also get to it via the menu items tucked in the status bar at the bottom of each document’s window. Open up a complicated InDesign document, one that’s in progress, and peek at the preflight section near the bottom of the document window. Is there a profile being applied? By default, the [Basic] profile is applied to new documents. You may see another profile applied, and that’s due to a handy feature: preflight profiles can be embedded into documents! This allows you to configure a document-specific profile and know that whoever ends up working on the document will have access to the same important preflight settings. To the right of the preflight profile’s name, you’ll see a green dot (good job!) or a red dot (uh-oh!), and to the right of that, the number of issues detected by preflight (Figure 2). To bring up those issues, click the little triangle to show the Preflight flyout menu, and choose Preflight Panel from that menu to open the Preflight panel. Within the panel, errors are divided into the relevant categories and display a brief description. To the right is the page number where the violation occurs—click on it to take you directly to the source of the problem.

Big documents will behave more slowly when Live Preflight is enabled, so sometimes you’ll want to temporarily disable it. To do so, deselect Preflight Document in the status bar’s flyout menu. The status bar will now display “Preflight off.” It’s good practice, if you receive a document from a client or colleague and preflight is off, to immediately turn it on and see what’s up! You can also configure preflight to only analyze a specific range of pages, which speeds it up and keeps you focused on the part of the document you’re working on. To delve deeper into Preflight, select Define Profiles from the panel, and create a new profile by clicking the plus button in the bottom-left corner; then give your profile a name. (Remember that profiles can get embedded in documents and kept around for years and years … so your cheeky joke might not be appropriate. This time.) Once you have created your profile, the options on the right side of the dialog box are your many-layered preflighting onion, from links of all types, to allowable color spaces, transparency, proportional images, missing fonts, and more. The options that are relevant to you are, of course, dependent on the work you produce and the complexity of your workflow! My personal strategy for Live Preflight is to have two main profiles. One  contains few settings and is active most of the time I am working. It checks for mistakes such as overset text, missing fonts, missing links—the type of big problems I would want to resolve sooner rather than later. The second profile is stricter, checking for color space issues, image resolution, nonproportional scaling, broken cross-references, and more. I use this profile less often, but more frequently close to the end of a production cycle, when I am trying to nail down every possible error. Preflight profiles can be exported and loaded from the Preflight Profiles dialog box, so you can share profiles with colleagues and freelancers. For a step-by-step tutorial on creating custom preflight profiles, check out Kirsten Rourke’s article in issue 61.

Document Fonts

This feature is simple: If your InDesign file is in a folder that contains a subfolder named “Document fonts,” any fonts inside that folder will be automatically available inside that InDesign document, even if you add those fonts to the folder when InDesign and the document are open. This works regardless of the font type, and it functions on top of any font management software you may have installed. There are three good ways to get fonts into a Document fonts folder: 1. Manually copy them there in the Finder or Windows Explorer. 2. Package an InDesign file with the Copy Fonts option selected. A Document fonts folder will be created and populated automatically (Figure 3). Note that fonts synced from Typekit cannot be packaged.

3. Use the Copy InDesign Fonts to Folder script from Ajar Productions. It copies every font in a document to a folder—ideal for creating a Document fonts folder when one doesn’t already exist! You may already have font management software installed, and you may feel that all this is unnecessary. For a long time, I felt the same way. Then I moved all of my production files into Dropbox to make better use of InCopy, and my editor and I instantly began to see what a time-saver this feature was, as the relevant fonts were always available to us both.

Spans and Splits

Before Creative Suite 5, if we wanted to have a header span multiple columns of text, it would require two text frames—one for the header, and one for the body. If the desired effect was a sidebar or other graphical entity, it was usually best to then add a third frame for the background, border stroke, and so on. Creative Suite 5 brought us Spans and Splits, one of the finest unsung hero features in recent memory. Spans and Splits can be applied from the Paragraph panel, but you’ll probably use this feature most often within paragraph styles. In both instances, the option is described only as Span Columns, but Split Columns is an option under the Paragraph Layout dropdown menu inside Span Columns. Spans have the most obvious options: you can specify how many columns are spanned (2 or higher, or simply choose All), and you can also set a Space Before and Space After the span, which functions like a normal paragraph space before/after, but applies to all lines of text above/below the span, if it is larger than the paragraph space for that paragraph style. Splits are most often used to create faux-tables or lists in the middle of text flow when a detailed/formatted table is not required. In addition to the number of splits (columns), you have the usual space before/after settings, and the ability to set the width of both the outside and inside gutters. Remember that if you build tables of contents, you may need to include multiple paragraph styles in the Table of Contents style to catch all the span/split variations. For more on using spans and splits, see Claudia McCue’s article “You’re Going to Love CS5” in issue 35.

Bringing it all together

Combine object styles, paragraph Next Styles, and spans and splits to easily format sidebars. A few paired styles can let you bounce between single, double, triple, and more columns in your sidebars, so you can optimize for the text you’re flowing!

“X” Marks the Spot (And You Are There)

For every piece of treasure we’ve found on this hunt, there are a half-dozen still uncovered! Some of them, like Sticky Previews passively help you get work done more efficiently, while others, such as Quick Apply or Anchored Objects, require some study and practice before they revolutionize your work. As mentioned in Keith Gilbert’s article earlier in this issue, one great place to learn more is James Wamser’s InDesign New Features Guide, which catalogs every new feature from version 1.0 (1999!) all the way to the current edition. And of course, consult the InDesign Magazine index to find information on just about every InDesign feature in existence. No matter which version of InDesign you’re using, there are always new things to discover. More hidden gems await! To find them, all you need is some curiosity, creativity, and persistence. And maybe a snack. You wouldn’t want to hunt for treasure on an empty stomach.