InDesign in Your Pocket

Or, InDesign on a Stick—a USB stick/thumbnail drive/flash drive. Although you can fit InDesign and all its component plug-ins on most portable USB flash drives, it won’t run from there. (Well, I’m sure somebody could get it to run, but I think that would violate the EULA.) What I mean by the title is taking your InDesign in your pocket, your unique configuration and work habits, and sitting down at any workstation and, in 30 seconds or less, making any copy of InDesign CS3 work exactly like InDesign on your main computer—complete with panel arrangements, keyboard shortcuts, menus, and even your own autocorrect settings and Find/Change queries.

It’s exceedingly simple, really. First, make sure you’ve created a new keyboard shortcut set, a new set of menus, and a new workspace. Create and save them in their respective manners. Nothing here is permanent, so please don’t feel pressured to create the perfect workspace or customize everything right now. Just do something simple for each, save the set, and close InDesign. Now, open a Finder or Explorer window and navigate to the InDesign folder:

Mac: [your user name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/InDesign/Version 5.0/

Windows: Documents and Settings\[your user name]\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\ Version 5.0\

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, and Glyph Sets. All of these folders store personal, per-user settings that are machine and even platform independent. You can pick up these files by copying the entire Version 5.0 folder, carry them to any other installation of InDesign CS3 on the same platform (Windows or Mac), copy them to the same locations on the new machine, and have access to them at that workstation just as you would your own. When you launch InDesign, your copied workspace will be on the Window>Workspaces menu, your keyboard and menu sets in the Keyboard Shortcuts and Customize Menu dialogs’ Sets dropdowns, and your Autocorrect, Find/Change, and Glyphs sets where they belong (I cover each later in this book). In fact, if you’re handy with scripting, you could probably write an Apple- Script or VBScript or BAT file that, upon execution on a target workstation, copies the Version 5.0 folder from the USB drive to the hard drive.