by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor Generally speaking, I recommend that you disable auto-updates for the Creative Cloud applications. You can do this by opening up your Creative Cloud Desktop application, clicking on your avatar on the top right and choosing Preferences. I allow my Creative Cloud Desktop App to keep itself  up-to-date. This control is in the General category in the list at the left. However, I do not let the Creative Cloud Desktop app automatically update my applications (like InDesign, Photoshop, illustrator, etc). You can turn this off by clicking on the Apps ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor In Adobe InDesign: Use nested styles to format run-in heads, I covered a very basic nested style example. Now let’s look a more complex situation. Here is a tea catalog with pages and pages (and pages) of teas. The tea names and countries disappear into the descriptions, just like the run-in heads in mentioned in the linked post, above. What if the client asks us to highlight the tea names and countries to help them stand out? There are two character styles listed at left—Country Name and Tea Name—that would take care of it, but applying them manually ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor Nested styles have been part of InDesign for a very long time. However, an early complaint was that a user couldn’t assign a nested style to a line of text within a multi-line paragraph. Adobe responded by adding one additional section to the bottom of Drop Caps and Nested Styles: Nested Line styles. They are similar, but different. (If you are looking for information on nested styles and not nested line styles, please scroll down to the links at the bottom of this page.) Why do we need both? A nested line style can apply a character style to a line o ..read more

By Barb Binder In InDesign, you can easily add or remove a stroke all the way around a frame, but sometimes we want to define a stroke on just one side of a frame. For that situation, use a hard drop shadow. Even better, save it as a an object style that you can apply it quickly when needed. Here’s how: Select a frame (text, graphic or unassigned). Set the frame fill to [Paper]. Window > Effects. Select Object and then Fx > Drop Shadow. This will produce a soft black shadow. Modify the drop shadow settings as follows: Blending: set the Mode to Normal, choose your stroke color and opac ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor on InDesign If you are an Adobe Photoshop user, you already know that the use of layers is critical to your Photoshop workflow. In InDesign, layers are optional. They are an organizational tool that some users take advantage of, and others choose to ignore. Using layers (for the most part) is a choice in InDesign and not a necessity. In any new document, InDesign creates a single layer called Layer 1. It is visible when you open the Layers panel with Window > Layers. It will be visible, unlocked and assigned the default color of blue. As you begin ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor on InDesign This seems like such an easy fix—and it is, but it’s not intuitive. New InDesign users quickly figure out that InDesign stacks our design elements in the order in which we add them. And when we need to change the stacking order, we can use Object > Arrange to rearrange the elements. This is a reliable fix in most situations because most new InDesign users haven’t discovered the Layers panel yet so are working entirely on Layer 1. But here’s the limitation: Bring to Front, Send to Back, etc. only work within a layer, and layers only disp ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor When you upgrade to a new version of InDesign, it’s usually a good idea to not import your previous settings to the new version. I find InDesign to be more stable over the long run if I turn that feature off and take a few minutes to set things up myself. I also leave the old version installed for at least a few months in case the new version has bugs. I normally begin by running through Preferences without any files open. For example, I prefer the dark interface, greeking set to zero and I disable triple click to select a line. It might take me five ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor for Creative Cloud Design & Layout Solutions InDesign has a handy shortcut you can use to index proper names. Let’s say you want to add the name John Doe to the index, but you would like it indexed in the D section, and appear as Doe, John. For proper names that you want indexed by the last name, press Shift+Alt+Ctrl+] (Windows) or Shift+Option+Command+] (Mac OS). An index marker using the default settings is added at the beginning of the selection or to the beginning of each item selected. That sentence means it will work once. But what if y ..read more

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor for Creative Cloud Design & Layout Solutions In a perfect world, we always hold the Shift key when resizing images to maintain the aspect ratio. However, as fallible humans, sometimes we forget. Luckily for us, it’s very easy restore the aspect ratio on an image. When a frame is selected, you will see a single value listed for the Effective PPI in both the Links panel and in the Info panel. In the image below, the original resolution (Actual PPI) was 240 pixels per inch. I scaled the image down—holding Cmd+Sh to both scale the image and the frame ..read more

By Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor on InDesign The Next Style attribute is little-understood property of a paragraph style. It can be used to automatically apply styles as you type. For example, let’s say that a title always follows a chapter number in my document. In the example below, I set the Next Style to Title in my ChapNum style definition. Once set up, after I type a paragraph styled as a ChapNum, I simply press Enter or Return to start a new paragraph. The new paragraph will be automatically styled as Title. Now I can just type in the title content. Next Style can also be as ..read more