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Preferences Pains
Change the Default Measurement Unit
I don''t know picas from pigeons, but that''s what InDesign insists I learn. My colleagues and I are used to using inches for specifying measures, have been for years. Are we hopelessly out of touch with the professional design world?
You obviously live in the United States, where inches seem to have permeated almost every aspect of culture. (Even spam! We keep getting emails that want to help us add inches to one part of our anatomy or another.) Of course, in Europe the most common graphic design measurement unit is the millimeter. Fortunately, you can change InDesign''s default measurement unit to just about anything you want. For your tastes, open the Preferences dialog box, choose the Units and Increments panel, and pick Inches from both the Horizontal and Vertical popup menus. If you want this setting to be the default for all documents you create from now on, make the change with no documents open (for more info, see the sidebar, "Customizing InDesign''s Application Defaults" below).
TIP
You can easily change the measurement unit on the fly for the current document. Put your cursor on top of the horizontal or vertical page ruler and right-click (or Control-click if you''re on a Mac with a one-button mouse). Choose your preferred measurement unit from the contextual menu (Figure 1-4).
Figure 1-4. Right-click on a ruler to switch to a different measurement unit on the fly.
Customizing InDesign''s Application Defaults
An application default is a software program''s "suggested setting" for a given dialog or palette field, menu choice, checkbox, radio button and the like. Back in the factory, before the program started shipping, software engineers and user interface experts had to go through each area of the program that offered a choice and decide on a starting setting.
Imagine this conversation:
Mary Engineer: "Most people want hyphenation on, so let''s turn it on by default."
Jim Interface: "Yeah, if they don''t want it, they can always turn it off."
Mary: "Okay, but what should we use for the minimum number of letters a word should have before auto-hyphenation kicks in? Five letters?"
Jim: "Six letters. No, five. No, six, definitely six. I don''t know, let''s toss a coin."
Mary: "Okay … Hey, how ''bout them Mariners?"
Fortunately, you don''t have to live with their suggestions for all of eternity. To change InDesign''s default settings, close all open documents. Though some features are now grayed out (such as the File > Export command), many will be accessible, including every tool and palette. Go ahead and modify whatever you want. For example, if you add a color to the Swatches palette, that color will be in every new document you create from here on out. If you turn on the Apply Leading To Entire Paragraphs checkbox in the Type panel of the Preferences dialog box, it''ll stay on for all new documents. And so on.
When you''re done, save your changes by quitting the program. (For some reason, defaults only get saved when you quit.) The next time you launch InDesign, you''ll enjoy the pleasant experience of the default settings reflecting your personal choices right from the start.
Rebuild InDesign''s Preferences
InDesign is acting sort of flakey. Every time I [fill in simple action here], it "unexpectedly quits," and/or it won''t let me drag out a ruler guide, and/or the pasteboard is five times normal size, etc.
Try rebuilding InDesign''s two files that together constitute its preferences: InDesign Defaults and InDesign Saved Data. The normal way to rebuild preferences is to root through your hard drive to locate the file(s), move them to your Trash or Recycle Bin and then restart the program, forcing it to rebuild a default set of preferences.
InDesign offers a more convenient way to do the same thing, via a keyboard shortcut. Quit InDesign if it''s running, start the program again, and immediately press the appropriate "rebuild preferences" keys as it''s launching:
Windows: Ctrl-Alt-Shift
Macintosh: Command-Control-Option-Shift
If InDesign launches without showing you an alert asking if you want to delete your preference file, then you didn''t hold down the modifier keys early enough. If you do see this alert, click the "Yes" button, and InDesign builds itself a fresh one as it completes the start-up process.
93) you may have made. If you''re a glyph set kind of guy or gal, be sure to back up the Preferences file (while it''s a healthy file) for safekeeping.
