InDesign: tips and tricks session

Apply Colors Quickly

To apply a color quickly, drag a swatch onto a frame, stroke, or table cell. This is also the easiest way to colorize a gray-scale TIFF or PSD image.

Keep Tabs on Preflight Errors

Look in the lower-left corner of InDesign's document window to see whether you have any preflight errors. If the error number starts creeping up, go to the Preflight panel for more information.

Dynamic Rotation Cursor

In InDesign CS5, you can forever eliminate trips to the Tools panel to choose the Rotate tool. Hover just beyond any object's corner with the Selection tool, and the cursor switches to a rotate icon. If you've selected multiple objects, they all rotate together -- no need to group them.

Bring Hidden Characters to Light

Hidden characters (also called invisibles) indicate the presence of non-printing characters, such as spaces, tabs, and paragraph returns. Most of the time, you don't need to see these, but when you do, Choose Type > Show Hidden Characters. The characters will be in the same color as layer they're on. When that's light yellow, for example, the hidden characters may be hard to see even after you choose Show Hidden Characters. In that case, just change the color of layer in the Layers panel.

No More All-Caps in Panel Names

When text is in all-caps, it can be difficult to read. Why then are the names of InDesign's panels in all caps? To change that, create a new, empty folder and name it "noallcaps". Place that folder in the InDesign application folder. The next time you restart InDesign, all panel names will be the more-pleasing upper/lowercase!

Add Tabs to Table Cells

To jump from cell to cell in an InDesign table, just press the Tab key. Handy, right? But to insert an actual tab character in a cell, you'll have to go to Type > Insert Special Character > Other > Tab.