Chapter 1 AL Customizing GH TE D MA TE RI “Creative efficiency.” If you read the refreshingly short introduction a few pages previous, you know that I believe the phrase “creative efficiency” to be among the most important ideals of our profession of designing for, or placing, ink on paper. To realize your creative potential, to enable the creatives working under you to realize their creative potential, you must minimize the impact of your tools on the process of creating.
| Chapter 1 Customizing The Adobe UI is growing ever more efficient in its use of screen real estate and ever more user customizable to facilitate your personal productivity within InDesign and the other Creative Suite applications. Panels can be free-floating, tabbed, stacked, grouped together into vertical panel bars à la the old Macromedia applications, and condensed into narrow icon and title tiles.
Panels The Panel Dock The dock is InDesign’s attempt to organize panels on single-monitor systems—or anywhere— where space is at a premium. Dragging panels to the side of the application window causes them to become labeled icons in the panel dock, a top-to-bottom reserved area of the application window (see Figure 1.1). In some programs, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, the icons initially appear unlabeled, resulting in a much slimmer dock (and consequently a wider document working area). Figure 1.
| Chapter 1 Customizing Table 1.
Panels Expand or contract the entire dock, inclusive of all the panels it contains, by clicking the double-arrow symbol at the very top of the panel. When the panel is in icon-only or collapsed tile mode, arrows will point inward, toward the application workspace and away from the edge; when the panel is expanded, arrows will point outward toward the edge of the screen.
| Chapter 1 Customizing InDesign can actually contain docks on both sides of the application window and can have multiple columns of panels arranged side by side in the dock. Just as with adding panels to the default right-side dock, creating and managing side-by-side docks is done by dragging. Begin by creating the first dock, and then drag another panel (or panel group) to the screen edge.
Panels Many panels—the Pages and Swatches panels, for instance—are resizable. Within a stack, they can be resized by hovering the cursor along their bottom edge, at the point where they join the next panel down, and dragging up or down. The cursor will become a double-headed arrow as a visual cue. Multistate Panels Many panels have expanded views with additional options, controls, or fields hidden by default.
| Chapter 1 Customizing Figure 1.5 Selection Tool Direct Selection Tool Page Tool Gap Tool The Tools panel Line Tool Scissors Tool Gradient Swatch Tool Gradient Feather Tool Note Tool Fill Default Fill and Stroke Formatting Affects Container Figure 1.
Panels The second option, whether to display the Tools panel in single-column, double-column, or single-row mode, is set in the Interface pane of InDesign’s Preferences (InDesign Preferences on the Mac and Edit Preferences on Windows). Easier than going that route, however, is to click the double arrows at the top of the Tools panel. When the Tools panel is floating, the double arrows will cycle it through the three states.
| Chapter 1 Customizing The very last object on the Control panel’s right end, a button that looks like three horizontal lines, is the Control panel’s flyout menu. Like the face of the Control panel, the commands on the flyout menu are context variable. At the bottom of the list, the Customize command is constant and opens the Customize Control Panel dialog box (see Figure 1.8). Here, by unchecking the show box in the expanding lists, you can selectively disable groups of controls or an entire mode.
Bars | depending on the task at hand, it contains the majority of controls, options, fields, and buttons from the Transform, Align, Character, Paragraph, and Table panels, as well as some from the Stroke, Text Wrap, Effects, Character Styles, Paragraph Styles, Object Styles, and other panels. All these controls share the same space onscreen, which is far less real estate than the respective panels consume individually—even with panel docking and other space-saving options.
| Chapter 1 Customizing Application Bar In an ongoing effort to get people to use the entry-level digital asset manager Adobe Bridge (and through it buy stock photography and subscribe to Adobe RSS newsfeeds), Adobe has, since the initial release of Bridge in Creative Suite (1), been integrating (some say infiltrating) all the major applications like InDesign with commands and buttons to launch Bridge.
Keyboard Shortcuts | Application Frame Exclusive to the Mac version of InDesign, owing to the differences in the way Mac and Windows handle application and document windows, is the option to attach all the panels and toolbars to a document window. Normally on a Mac, the Application bar and Control panel are docked directly beneath the menu bar; the Tools panel is docked to one side of the screen; and other panels are docked to the other side of the screen.
| Chapter 1 Customizing Keyboard shortcuts save tremendous time and effort and are, in my opinion, the greatest productivity-enhancing invention since instant coffee (created by Saint Juan Valdez circa 35,000 bce). InDesign is loaded with keyboard shortcuts to speed your work. And, at this point in the narrative, many software book authors would launch into several pages of keyboard shortcuts or direct you to the back of the book, to an index of the same.
Keyboard Shortcuts | From the Product Area dropdown menu select Edit Menu, which lets you view and customize commands on the application’s Edit menu. Click Cut in the Commands list. Its shortcut—Cmd+X/Ctrl+X—will appear in the Current Shortcuts field beneath the list. Don’t like that shortcut? Click Default: Cmd+X or Default: Ctrl+X to highlight it, and then click the Remove button.
| Chapter 1 Customizing There are only so many keys on the QWERTY keyboard, only so many modifiers and combinations of keys, so customizing keyboard shortcuts in InDesign often entails sacrificing keyboard access to one command for another. By the same token, just as you can add multiple shortcuts to Cut, other commands already have multiple shortcuts. Do they need two (or three)? Probably not, which means their extras are fair game for commands that don’t have any.
Menus | Now, go to the Menus command at the bottom of the Edit menu to open Menu Customization (see Figure 1.13). Similar to customizing keyboard shortcuts, you have sets to create and choose from and two categories of menus—Application Menus, those that appear within the menu bar at the top of the InDesign window, and Context & Panel Menus, which are the flyout menus on panels as well as those menus that appear when you right-click (Control-click for you singlebutton Mac mouse users) something.
| Chapter 1 Customizing Customizing InDesign to Easily Create Workflow-Focused Workstations I was asked to improve the workflow of a high school newspaper. The request came from Pam, the editor-in-chief and a teacher at the school. Pam was exasperated with her paper’s workflow. She had good reporters and editors, but none of them had had graphic design training despite the fact that they laid out their own copy and photos and worked up advertisements for the paper’s local sponsors.
Plug-In Customization As a last step, after making all the menu and keyboard shortcut changes and showing and arranging all the required panels, we saved all the presets individually and created a new workspace that unified these settings. The result was a lean InDesign installation completely customized to the needs of the school newspaper and bereft of anything that didn’t have a place in the workflow.
| Chapter 1 Customizing InDesign can function, to one degree or another, absent any of the nonrequired plug-ins. Therefore, if some or all of the people in your workgroup have no need of something like, say, hyperlinks and the Hyperlinks panel or type on a path, you can save (a little) system overhead and tidy up the InDesign interface a bit by disabling the plug-ins that add those functions. In past versions, plug-ins were managed from the Configure Plug-Ins dialog box.
Workspaces | same reasons you’d want to disable some menus—a cleaner display, the aforementioned smaller RAM footprint, and to limit workstation installs to only what is required of the user’s workflow. If your team works in a strictly print workflow, for instance, and never exports to HTML or Flash, you can remove commands, panels, and everything else to do with hyperlinks, rollover buttons, sound and video, HTML export, and so on.
| Chapter 1 Customizing whereas creating a publication that will be distributed only on the client’s website as a PDF does need Hyperlinks and probably doesn’t need the Separations Preview and Trap Presets panels. By employing multiple, project-specific workspaces, you can further reduce panel clutter by limiting the application to only what the one type of project needs, without the chore of having to manually open, close, and arrange panels every time you switch to a different task or project.
Customizing Application Defaults | Within those folders, you should see a subfolder for Workspaces. Open that, and you’ll find an XML file of the workspace you just created. Go back up to the Menu Sets folder to find your recently created menu set. At the same level as both of those folders, you’ll find others, called InDesign Shortcut Sets, Autocorrect, Find-Change Queries, Glyph Sets, Print Presets, Preflight Presets, and more.
| Chapter 1 Customizing Here I should note three important points: •u After setting your new defaults, you should close and restart InDesign to commit those changes to the InDesign preferences saved on your hard drive; if InDesign crashes before you’ve closed it, you’ll lose those changes. •u Similarly, unlike workspaces and keyboard shortcut sets, your newly set defaults are part of the application preferences and can’t be saved out to external files.
The Bottom Line Change the Default Font, Colors, and More Out of the box, InDesign CS5 uses Minion Pro 12/14.4 pt as the default text style and includes swatches for process magenta, cyan, and yellow and RGB red, green, and blue. These defaults are fine if your average document uses 12/14.4 Minion Pro and only solid process or RGB colors.
