Datasheet

Plug-in Customization
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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. The final step was
to copy the shortcut set, menu set, and workspace from the build machine to the staff’s workstations
and load the preset workspace that mirrored the workstations to the build machine.
Pam tells her students that the customized InDesign is the long-rumored Adobe InDesign Elements,
a new product built specifically for black-and-white newsletter publishing that Adobe is test mar-
keting among several schools and newspapers.
Of course, these changes couldn’t prevent a student from drawing something completely inappro-
priate in Illustrator or Photoshop and then placing it in InDesign. Both of those applications have
similar customization features, and we limited some of their functionality on the workstations,
but by necessity, it couldn’t be as thorough a streamlining as within InDesign. Still, last I heard,
Pam’s per-issue cleanup had dropped from a full night of work to less than two hours because of
the limited InDesign installations.
Plug-In Customization
Another level of application customization available to you is via the removal of plug-ins.
(Individual users, feel free to skip this section.)
InDesign, you see, is not so much an application in the traditional sense of computer program-
ming. It isn’t hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code compiled into a single executable
like most other applications. InDesign.exe (Windows) and InDesign.app (Mac) is actually a
plug-in wrapper. All of InDesign’s functionality is added through plug-ins that are no different
from third-party plug-ins you may buy to give InDesign functionality Adobe didn’t give it. Don’t
believe me? Go look in your InDesign installation folder (Applications/Adobe/Adobe InDesign
CS5 on the Mac, Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS5 or Program Files (x86)\Adobe\
Adobe InDesign CS5 on Windows). The InDesign application itself is but a few megabytes.
Look inside the Plug-Ins folder on the Mac to find numerous .InDesignPlugin files
arranged in subfolders. On Windows, you’ll see the same subfolders beneath the Plug-Ins
folder. On either platform, you’ll see mostly plain-English names for all your favorite InDesign
panels and features. The Eyedropper tool, for instance, is added to InDesign Windows
by the inclusion of the Eyedropper Tool.apln plug-in; the Print dialog box is PrintUI.
InDesignPlugin on the Mac. The InDesign executable mostly acts as activator to run those
plug-ins and glue to allow them to work together. There’s also an extra layer of organiza-
tion on Windows that isn’t on the Mac. Windows users will note the Program Files\Adobe\
Adobe InDesign CS5\Required (or Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS5\
Required) folder, which contains IDRC plug-in files. As the name implies, everything in the
Required folder is required for InDesign to fulfill its base purpose. In the Plug-Ins folder are
all the optional plug-ins, the ones InDesign can function without. Most you wouldn’t want it to
run without, though. For example, you could pull out Page Setup Dialog.apln, but then you
wouldn’t be able to alter page sizes. On the Mac, plug-ins aren’t so easily differentiated because
required and nonrequired plug-ins all share the .InDesignPlugin extension.
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