No. There is an align to/away from spine, but the indents are just left and right.
Hm. Can’t think of a good way to do this. Maybe with text wrap?

Great question. I don’t know of a KBSC that will do that. But you can always double-click (with the Selection tool).

Sorry, but I can’t think of anything. If it doesn’t change when you are logged in as a different user, or after deleting preferences, then something has gone very, very wrong. You may have to reinstall InDesign. Have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling from the Creative Cloud app?

Rules are meant to be broken. If the text looks better with a tighter letterspace, then go for it. However, I usually do not use tracking to do this for an entire paragraph or story. Instead, I adjust the Justification settings:
https://creativepro.com/adjust-word-spacing-in-paragraph-styles.php
and
https://creativepro.com/what-are-your-favorite-word-and-character-space-settings-for-hjs.php

If it is just some text inside a paragraph (a word or phrase), then applying a character style that changes tracking is the way to go.

Great that you’re exploring this!

This is the only method I know of: https://creativepro.com/data-merging-individual-records-separate-pdfs.php

I wouldn’t trust copying and pasting to save too much. It’s really just for saving simple vector shapes that you’re going to further edit in InDesign.

But placing a PDF or AI file should work just fine! Try saving from Illustrator as a .ai file and placing that into a new document in InDesign. Does the spot color appear in the Swatches panel? If not, it’s possible that it’s not actually a spot color in AI and just looks like one.

Katie, I wonder if perhaps something got corrupted/messed up in your file itself. You might consider exporting as IDML and then opening that IDML file. That rebuilds the file and often cleans up oddities. Glad you found a temporary solution though!