CreativeTechs Tips

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The cursing has already started. You’ve installed CS4, but most of your studio’s active projects are still in InDesign CS3. Now each time you double-click on an InDesign CS3 document in the Mac Finder, it opens up in InDesign CS4.

InDesignProxy is a free utility that fixes this annoyance by working as a ’stand-in’ for InDesign. Drag any INDD file onto the InDesignProxy application, and it automatically opens your file in the correct version of InDesign.

[Update: Kris Coppieters has provided us a link to InDesignProxy 1.0.5 which allows you to set the Finder to open all INDD files this way automatically. We'll be updating our tip later today to reflect the new version.] Read the Full Tip »

Most InDesign production artists have a routine they repeat dozens of times a day: Place a graphic into an image frame, and quickly type a keyboard command to fit the graphic to the frame size. It becomes an instinctive keystroke.

Command-Option-Shift-E fits the graphic proportionally.
Command-Option-Shift-C fills the frame with your graphic.

But, no matter how fast your fingers are, there is a quicker way: InDesign’s frame fitting options. Select an image frame, and choose Object > Fitting > Frame Fitting Options. You can preset how you want your graphics to fit when they are placed into that frame. Perfect for catalogs and magazines where large numbers of images are used in existing layout templates. Add this setting to an Object Style and you’ve really got a timesaving technique!

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One of the most powerful (and least intuitive) features added in Adobe InDesign CS3 is the new GREP panel in the Find/Change dialog box. GREP is a powerful tool that lets you use wildcards to search and replace text.

A full discussion of GREP in InDesign is beyond what we can cover in one of our tips. Instead, this tip includes links to a number of resources, cheatsheets, and a great book published by O’Reilly on using GREP in InDesign CS3.

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This is a short 3-minute segment taken from the live webinar InDesign Style Sheets on September 10, 2008. The full version of this workshop covers the fundamentals of InDesign’s character styles and paragraph styles, and quickly gets into tips, tricks, and shortcuts that should please even the most seasoned InDesign user. Style sheets can be a huge time saver for designers — especially in the creation of long or multi-page documents. [View all Upcoming Webinar Topics]