Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Document Setup Hassles

Bypass the New Document Dialog

Back in the old days, choosing File > New Document would give you just that: a new document. Now none of the programs I use, including InDesign, will do this simple task. Why does InDy force me to Suffer the Tortures of a Thousand Fields (my nickname for the New Document dialog box) every single time I want to create a new file?

You're absolutely right. Here's what to do: If you press Command-Option-N/Ctrl-Alt-N, InDesign will skip the New Document dialog and slap up a new document right quick-like. It uses the same specifications (margins, page size, and so on) as the last document preset you chose (we'll talk about document presets in just a moment). If you haven't made any document presets, you get the defaults: either a letter-size or an A4 page (depending on where you live). If you're not happy with the specs, you can always change the margins on your master page (Layout > Margins and Columns), and everything else in File > Document Setup.

Change the New Document Defaults

At my company, very few of the documents we create in InDesign require facing pages. I don't remember the last time I did one, in fact. Yet every time I open the New Document dialog box (File > New > Document), "Facing Pages" is checked on by default.

Start up InDesign, but don't open any InDesign files. You'll note that many menu items and palettes are accessible, even though there's no document to apply the menu command or palette setting to. Interesting, eh? That means everything you do now will apply to all future documents.

Let's take advantage of it. Open the File > Document Setup dialog box and turn off the Facing Pages option. Click OK, quit InDesign, and then relaunch it again. Now when you open the New Document dialog box, the Facing Pages checkbox is turned off.

Create Your Own Document Presets

There are about four or five different types of documents I create in InDesign, and each one has its own particular settings for margins, facing pages, bleed guides, and so on. I keep a cheat sheet of the settings on a Post-It by my desk, but it's still a pain to enter them one by one.

Don't worry, you'll just have to enter them one more time, we promise. Go to File > New > Document, and enter all the settings for one of these types of projects. Don't forget to click the More Options button to set up any bleed and slug guides as well. Now, resisting the urge to click OK yet, look for one more button to the right: Save Preset (Figure 2-1). Click it to save these settings as a Document Preset, a head start on creating future versions of this project.

Enter a Preset name that will make sense to you a few weeks from now, or to a freelancer who's taking care of your projects while you're slurping up mango daiquiris on Maui.

When it's time to churn out the next newsletter (or whatever), you can open the New Document dialog box and choose the name of your Preset from the popup menu at the top (Figure 2-2). All your settings appear in the appropriate fields, just as you first entered and saved them. Click OK to create your document with these settings.

You can create as many Document Presets as you want. They're saved in your InDesign Preferences file on your hard drive, so be sure to keep a back up copy handy in case you ever need to rebuild your Preferences (see page 10).

TIP

You can pick a document preset and bypass the New Docu-ment dialog box altogether by holding down the Shift key while selecting a document preset from the File > Document Presets menu.

Alphabetize the Document Presets

My Document Presets menu lists about 30 different presets that I've created over the past few months. Since they appear in the order I created them, and not alphabetically, it's a pain finding the one I want.

You can force any InDesign menu to temporarily appear in alphabetical order by pressing Command-Option-Shift/Ctrl-Alt-Shift when you click on the menu bar name. To see these menus' submenus appear in alphabetical order as well, keep the modifier keys held down while you drag down the menu to open the submenu (Figure 2-3).

In other words, you can get your Document Presets to appear in alphabetical order if you access them via the File > Document Presets submenu while holding down these modifier keys. The "force alpha" trick doesn't work for popup menus inside dialog boxes, so you can't use it on the Preset menu in the New Document dialog box. Bummer.

Trivia Quiz

What's the smallest custom page size you can create in InDesign, and what's the largest?

Answer:
Smallest is one inch square, largest is eighteen feet square (that's 1,296 picas, for you designer-geeks).

Turn Off Facing Pages

I thought my document should be set up as facing pages, but now, halfway through the project, I'm thinking it's more trouble than it's worth. Do I have to start all over again with a new document (that's set to non-facing pages), and copy everything over?

Nope. Just open your current document, go to File > Document Setup and turn off the Facing Pages checkbox. All the 2-page document spreads in your Pages palette change to 1-page spreads.

Reapply Right-Facing Masters to Non-Facing Pages" tip on page 33.

Merge Two Documents

I need to add pages from one document into another. When I worked in QuarkXPress, I would do this via a "thumbnail drag" (put both documents in Thumbnail view and drag pages over). But there's no Thumbnail view in InDesign! My workaround is to copy all the items from one page of Document A, and use Edit > Paste in Place to paste the items in the right position in Document B. But as far as I can tell InDesign only lets you Paste in Place one page at a time.

It's true that Paste in Place only works one page (or spread) at a time. If you've got more than a couple pages to bring over, though, don't even bother. There's an easier way. Let's call it "icon drag."

Open both Document A and Document B. You may want to tile them (Window > Arrange > Tile) so you can see both documents at the same time on your monitor. There's no need to change your current document view. The two documents don't even need to be the same page dimensions! (Though if they aren't page objects may shift around.)

Add Custom Page Sizes

Want to edit the options in the Page Size popup menu in the New Document dialog box? Perhaps you use poster-size pages. No problem.

Look inside the Adobe InDesign CS application folder on your hard drive for a file called "New Doc Sizes.txt" (it's inside the program's Presets folder; in CS on the Mac it was called "New Page Sizes.txt"). Double-click the text file to open it in your default text editor.

This file contains both the instructions on adding new page sizes and the data InDesign uses to build this menu. The instructions are simple: You add one line of information to the end of this file for each new page size you want to add to the New Document dialog box. Each line should state three things, separated by multiple spaces or tabs: The Preset name (which can include spaces), its width, and its height. Be sure to include the InDesign shorthand for measurement units in the width and height specifications, such as "20in" or "60p9" with no spaces. These will get converted to whatever default measurement unit is in effect in InDesign.

Here are some example lines you can add, lifted right from the text file:

Certificate

11"

9"

Poster

17in

22"

Postcard

15cm

100mm

As soon as you've saved your changes to the file, InDesign learns about it and includes them in the Page Sizes popup menu in the New Document dialog window. You don't have to quit the program first or anything.

We can't figure out a way to remove the existing Page Sizes that you don't use (they're not part of the New Doc Sizes.txt file). But we're working on it.

To bring pages from Document A into Document B, open the Pages palette and select the page(s) you want to copy over. (Shift-click to select contiguous pages; Command/Ctrl-click to select non-contiguous pages.) Then drag the actual little icons of your selected pages from Document A's Pages palette and drop them onto Document B's window (not its Pages paletteit has no Pages palette of its own, when you think about it. There's only one, and you're using it to drag the icons out of; Figure 2-4).

It makes no difference where you drop the page icons onto the receiving document, they always get added after the last page. Click on that document to make it active, and use the Pages palette to rearrange the pages as necessary.

And Merge Their Master Pages, Too

When I add a page from another InDesign document to my current file by dragging its Pages palette icon over (see previous solution), its master page doesn't come along with it.

When the master page names are identical in the two documents, the dragged-over page gets re-linked to the one in its new document. That behavior would be really useful if it were what you wanted to happen. But in this case it's not. So, before you drag over the page icon, rename that document's master page so it doesn't match the names of any of the master pages in your current document. This time when you drag the page icon over, the uniquely-named master will come along for the ride.

By the way, if you want to copy a master page from one document to another, you can just drag the master page icon from the Pages palette.