If you change the “Relative to” method in Preferences, Grids, from “Top of Page” to “Top Margin”, you can change the margins on your master page and have the first baseline go down with it. Using this method, you cannot change to another start at distance and increment — these are global settings.

However, you can also set specific baseline settings for every single text frame in your document: in “Text Frame Options” select the Baseline Options, then enable “Custom Baseline Grid”. You can also save this settings in an Object Style (in the Text Frame Baseline Options section) , so all it would take is selecting your chapter start frame and apply your new object style.

That sounds like there is an internal conflict somewhere in your fonts. Check if you have two different font files that have the same name … (I think ID takes the safe route and ignores it altogether).

If you cannot find duplicates, try deleting the Adobefnt*.lst font cache files on your system (the star stands for 'any number' — you might find more than a single file). On my Mac I find these files in my InDesign application folder, but you might want to search everywhere, just in case.

You can safely delete these files, as they will be re-built and updated on the next start of InDesign.

That sounds like there is an internal conflict somewhere in your fonts. Check if you have two different font files that have the same name … (I think ID takes the safe route and ignores it altogether).

If you cannot find duplicates, try deleting the Adobefnt*.lst font cache files on your system (the star stands for 'any number' — you might find more than a single file). On my Mac I find these files in my InDesign application folder, but you might want to search everywhere, just in case.

You can safely delete these files, as they will be re-built and updated on the next start of InDesign.

You might want to investigate other programs that have specifically been written to create HTML.

It's possible to export to XHTML from an InDesign document, but you will loose all advanced formatting, and you will have to manually fill in every style in the CSS. InDesign has not been designed with HMTL output in mind; it's more the other way around, it provides a way to get your text into XHTML if you really, really need it to.

Oh absolutely. The magic GREP code to search for one out of a set of characters is [this] — every single character between the square brackets. [this], for example, will find either a single 't', 'h', 'i', or 's', and [that] will find a single 't', 'h', or 'a' (the duplicate 't' is ignored).

This GREP search will find either a straight single quote or a single curly one, and only when preceded by a digit:

(?<=d)[~'~]]

and you can find its twinned brothers using

(?<=d)[~”~}]

A Table of Contents story gets a special 'tag' from InDesign, so it knows what it can throw away when replacing the old one. It sounds like this got messed up somewhere.

Is your entire contents a story of its own? (I.e., not linked through with the rest of your document?)

If so, can you check if it goes back to work if you create a new table of contents, place it alongside your pages, then cut-n-paste the newly generated text over the old contents?

(I'm a Quark user trying to switch to ID)

“Do, or don't do. There is no try.” (Well: try to let go of your Quark experience as soon as possible, and do not treat InDesign as Quark-with-added-bits :-D )

It's in your Preferences dialog, under Composition: “Substituted Fonts”. It's really a rather dangerous thing to switch off — you might want to communicate this towards your client — because, apart from the message on opening the document, it might go unnoticed. This setting is saved with the document, and your client switched it off. Bad behavior, really.

Also, don't only rely on your eyes to spot pink highlighted text. Sometimes this gets obscured by other graphic elements (a pink background, for example). Always use “Find font” under the Type menu to double- and triple-check if you saw and corrected every occurrence — I use this so much I added a hot key combo for that function.