If you were in attendance for The InDesign + Long Documents Summit 2024 you know it was an amazing event, featuring six sessions overflowing with great advice for building books, proposals, and other complex documents with maximum efficiency. If you missed the live event, you can still take advantage of an on-demand pass to watch videos of the sessions and Q&A, and get access to over 100 pages of handouts. Here’s my list of five great tips from the event.
Printing Grids and Guides
Nigel French
Every successful long document project starts with a great template. And in his session Building and Customizing Document Templates, Nigel French shared a comprehensive set of best practices for InDesign templates. The one I liked the best was to print your template (or export a reference PDF) with Visible Guides and Grids turned on. That way, anyone using your template can see exactly how lines of text and other page items are supposed to be aligned.
Use Relative Character Styles
Erica Gamet
In Souped-Up Styles and Next-Level Formatting, Erica Gamet offered the sage advice of making flexible “relative” character styles that don’t contain any font information. That way, the font from the underlying paragraph style is used, so one character style can be used throughout your document for applying formatting like bold or italics. And you never have to worry about the design changing because your styles will adapt instantly if you ever have to change the fonts applied by your paragraph styles.
Showing Direct Formatting in Word
Julie Shaffer
Sometimes we don’t notice useful features, even when they’re right in front of our eyes. Then when someone shows you what you’ve been missing you get a mixture of embarrassment and excitement. That was the case for me during Julie Shaffer’s Essential Prep and Cleanup Techniques when she pointed out the feature in the Mac version of Word called Show Direct Formatting Guides. You can find it at the bottom of the Styles Pane. When this is turned on any manually applied formatting is highlighted so you can fix it before placing the manuscript into InDesign.
Super Snippets
Russell Viers
In Construction Fundamentals, Russell Viers showed just how useful snippets can be. Snippets are pieces of content that you can export from one InDesign document and load into others. They’re incredibly lightweight since they’re composed of XML code. And they bring all the necessary document resources like styles and swatches when you place them. You can see snippets in action in this video post.
Dynamic Dot Leaders
Chad Chelius
In Must-Know Long Document Features, Chad Chelius showed the best way of making dot leaders for table of contents entries. He applied an underline to the space between the TOC entry and the page number, using a dotted stroke style and a Right Indent Tab. The advantage of aligning on a Right Indent Tab is that it will continue to work just fine if the text formatting, spacing, or width of the text frame changes. It is also the best approach for accessibility, since a screen reader won’t read the dots as content because they’re just an underline.
Exposing Effective Resolution
Laurie Ruhlin
By default, there’s no easy way to keep an eye on the effective resolution of placed images as you scale them up or down in the layout. But in Prepping and Outputting Print and Digital Documents, Laurie Ruhlin shared a great workaround. By setting Effective PPI to be a visible column of information in the Links panel, you can always see which images might cause you problems at output and fix them before they cause you grief.
One for the Books
These are just a few of the great tips and tricks you can learn by getting an on-demand pass to The InDesign + Long Documents Summit. Grab yours now, and I bet it won’t be long until you’ve got your own list of top tips you learned at the event.
This article was last modified on April 30, 2024
This article was first published on April 8, 2024
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Yeah, that “Show Direct Formatting Guides” feature was totally new to me, too! Amazing!!
I love how now matter how long we’ve been doing this, there’s always more cool stuff to learn.