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CHAPTER 1 Customizing
Here I should note three important points:
After setting your new defaults, you should close and restart InDesign to commit those
•u
changes to the InDesign preferences saved on your hard drive; if InDesign crashes before
you’ve closed it, you’ll lose those changes.
Similarly, unlike workspaces and keyboard shortcut sets, your newly set defaults are part
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of the application preferences and can’t be saved out to external files. Thus, if your prefer-
ences become corrupted and you have to reset them by holding Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+Shift/
Ctrl+Alt+Shift while launching InDesign, your typeface, hyphenation, and any other new
defaults will be reset to the factory defaults.
You should also realize that setting new defaults makes them the defaults only for new
•u
documents—existing documents will use the defaults set at the time of their creation.
Sharing Customizations
Many of the customizations we’ve covered in this chapter can be easily shared with others in your
workgroup. Things like workspaces, keyboard shortcuts, autocorrect pairs, find/change queries,
and more can be shared and standardized across your team. In Chapter 14, “Collaboration,” you’ll
learn how; you’ll also learn about the more powerful means of document and page collaboration
available with InDesign CS5.
The Bottom Line
Organize Panels and Use the Panel Docks Docks and other options make organizing pan-
els in the workspace easier than ever before.
Master It Beginning with the default workspace, open all the panels you expect to use
in most projects and close those you won’t. Now, using grouping, stacking, docking, or
just free-floating panels, arrange the panels to fit your work style, and leave yourself as
much room to work on documents as possible.
Customize Keyboard Shortcuts Adobe couldn’t assign a keyboard shortcut to every-
thing—there just aren’t enough keys—so it did its best. Many of your favorite commands
may not have shortcuts or may have shortcuts you dislike. You can add or change keyboard
shortcuts for any command in InDesign.
Master It Just for fun, create keyboard shortcuts for each of the object effects—Basic
Feather, Bevel and Emboss, and so on.
Remove Parts of InDesign to Create Lean, Workflow-Specific Installations By customiz-
ing menus and disabling plug-ins, you can easily remove features and functions of InDesign
not required by your workflow. Doing so streamlines the interface, reduces errors, and ulti-
mately increases productivity among workflows that do not require the entirety of InDesign.
Master It To test your hand at removing features from InDesign, find all the features
that are new or improved in CS5 and hide their menu commands. Then, color green the
first 10 still-enabled menu commands about which you’d like to learn more. Finally, dis-
able the plug-ins that show panels you or your team members aren’t likely to need.
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