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When you get a new car, don't you usually start by adjusting your mirrors and
your seats? Or like if you get a new bike, you adjust the seat and the
handlebars? Or even, if you get a new desk, you put your pens and your markers
in the left and you put your coffee cup on its little placement on the right
and you adjust your monitor and how far away it is from you and so on?
Well, design and production pros do the same thing with their software. I mean,
think about it. If you're going to spend 5-10 hours a day working with
InDesign, you might as well customize it to your liking.
I want to cover two main areas of customizing InDesign, custom workspaces and
custom keyboard shortcuts. When you're customizing either of these, it makes no
difference if you have a document open or not. They are permanently saved with your
program. So the first thing, let's talk about are workspaces.
As you know, there are a few different built-in workspaces with Adobe
InDesign. These workspaces were put together by the engineers at Adobe. They're
thinking well, if somebody's working on a book, here are the panels that
they probably want to work with. If somebody is working with creating interactive
PDFs, then they probably want these. The one that most people use as a default
is the Advanced panel. But for example, if you very seldom ever use the Gradient
panel, then why are you letting it take up space here? This would
be like having a stapler on your desk and you never staple anything. So get rid
of it. Move the Gradient panel out of here and close the Gradient panel. Take some
time to modify the panel dock on the right and maybe to reorganize their order
to the way that you like to work. Here's another thing that you might want to
do. In the Links panel, which I think that every
InDesign user uses, the Links panel by default only shows the Name, Status
and Page Number of Links of placed pictures and graphics. But if you go
to Panel Options, you can choose to show much more in the top area of the Links
panel. Like for example, you might want to see the
Effective resolution, the Scale amount, the Color Space, the Format, such as, if it's
EPS or PSD. A lot of people who work with layers would
love to be able to see at a glance which layer a certain placed item is on to make
sure that they've put all their graphics on the graphic layer, for example.
Now, none of this will get saved. If I ever choose to reset the Advanced
workspace, all this will get wiped out. Let me enlarge this so you can see the
columns now. If you want to save this setting, then I would need to save it in
a custom workspace. So at some point, add the panels that you
work with a lot to the panel dock. Get rid of the panels that you hardly ever
use, take them out of the panel dock. Of course, you can always open then on the
fly, right, from the Window menu. I'm not saying you're deleting them permanently
from the program. Then make them all look nice and neat and
then save them in a custom workspace. So go to the Workspace Switcher from the Application
bar and choose New Workspace. In here I'll just call it My favorite
workspace. That way, the next time that I sit down and I'm working on a
project and I'm dragging stuff out of the panels and maybe I'm working on an interactive
project. So I'm working on Page Transitions and I've
got the Swatches panel over here because I'm cycling through different Swatches
and things are all messed up, and I want to quickly get back to a workspace
that suits me the best, and that's nice and neat. I can just come up here
and choose My favorite workspace and then Reset My favorite workspace. And
there it is and all my links, customizations are saved and so on.
If you ever decide, you know what, I actually use, let's say, the Info panel a
lot, but it's not part of this workspace. How would you edit this workspace?
There is no edit current workspace command. All you do is go ahead and tweak
your current workspace however you'd like, and then come up here and choose New
Workspace and give it the same name. That's why there is a dropdown menu here.
So My favorite workspace, say OK. A workspace with that name already exists.
Do you want to replace it? Yes please. There you go. So that's how you edit a current workspace.
Now what about custom keyboard shortcuts? Every InDesign professional at least
once in their life creates custom keyboard shortcuts. Let me switch over to the
Mac side where I have a document open. For example, in this workspace, let's
say that I'm working with InCopy and one of the panels that I work with a lot
in InCopy is the Assignments panel. A command that I use a lot in the Assignments
panel is Update Selected Assignments or Update Out-of-Date Assignments,
but there is no keyboard shortcut for that. If you are constantly going
for the same menu item, and there is no keyboard shortcut for that, or
maybe you're constantly using a menu item that you can't memorize like Paste in
Place. It's hard for you to memorize this keyboard shortcut then you should create
a custom keyboard shortcut. To do that, go to the Edit menu, down to Keyboard
Shortcuts and start by creating a New Set. You can't edit the Default
Set, which is fail safe if in case you mess things up, you can always go
back to the Default Set. Choose New Set and it's based on the Default Set, I'll
call this Anne Marie and then add the keyboard shortcut that you want.
Now, if I wanted to add that keyboard shortcut for a panel item, then you look
in the Product Area and go down to Panel Menus. They are in alphabetical order
according to the name of the panel. So Assignment appears first here, but if I
scroll down you can see there is the Character panel and the Effects panel.
So what I'm looking for in the Assignments panel is Update Out-of-Date
Assignments or Update Selected Assignments. You can see that neither one of
these has a keyboard shortcut. So I just clicked in the New Shortcut field and
type in a shortcut. It has to be a modifier key plus another key.
So for example, I'm on the Mac, so I get to use my handy-dandy Ctrl key.
I'll use Ctrl+U, which is currently assigned to unassigned. Now if, let's say that
for some reason, I press Command+U, which turns Smart Guides on and off.
If this is a keyboard shortcut that I never use anyway, whenever I want to turn
Smart Guides off, I'm in the habit of going up to the Application bar and
turning it off from the little widget up here. Then you can just go ahead and
use it. There is nothing wrong with overwriting an existing keyboard shortcut
that's used for something that you hardly ever use. It doesn't delete that
feature, just means you can't use the keyboard shortcut for that anymore.
However, be careful about doing something like this. I'm going to press the
Delete key on my Mac keyboard, which is the same as the Backspace key on
Windows. I've seen people do this because they want to clear out a keyboard
shortcut that they don't want to use, and instead, InDesign interprets it as
this is the key that you want to use. You can see it's currently assigned to
Clear. In other words, delete, which means that you could never press the
Backspace or the Delete key to delete a selection. You would always have to go
to the Edit menu and choose Clear. So you don't want to do that.
I'm going to go back to Ctrl+U. Just remember to click the Assign button.
If you clicked OK here, it would not remember what you just did. So click Assign
so that it appears here under Current Shortcuts. While I'm here I'm going to add a couple of
more keyboard shortcuts that I recommend that you use. Like, for example,
if you are a fan of Dynamic Spellcheck. The spell check that puts a red
squiggly underneath misspelled words or repeated words so that you can do
a spell check on the fly. There is no keyboard shortcut to turn that
on and off. So go ahead and add one. Now, Dynamic Spellcheck is an easy one, because
it's inside the Edit menu. If the command is inside a menu then you just
have to go to the name of the menu here, where all of the commands that are possible
to do in that menu appear in alphabetical order.
So if it's preceded by a menu command with one of those fly-out menus, then
you'll see it appear separated by these colons here. So I'm looking for
Spelling: Dynamic Spelling. Then I want a keyboard shortcut that will turn that
on and off. Let's try Ctrl+D here, and I'll click Assign, and I'll do one more.
One keyboard shortcut that drives me crazy is the W key which is the keyboard
shortcut for switching from Normal View to Preview and the problem is that if
you are currently typing some text and you press W, it's just going to enter W,
it's not going to switch you to Preview. So I'm going to change that.
Now, the toggle command for switching between the two is actually in the Tools
Product Area because it's coming from the bottom of the Tools panel. So in the
Tools panel, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see it says Toggle
view setting between default and preview. You can leave that there if you'd like so
that in case somebody is used to using the W, it still works. But you can add
another shortcut. You can have multiple shortcuts for the same command. In
here, I'll just press Ctrl+W. Why not that? Right.
So now either one of these will work and I'll click OK and now if I want to--
I'm going to check out the story so I can edit it and zoom in, and I want to do
a Dynamic Spellcheck. I can just press Ctrl+D and InDesign automatically puts a
squiggle underneath the misspelled words and the repeated words.
If I want to update this assignment, I just select it and press Ctrl+U, which
updates the assignment. I'm going to go to Fit In Window with Command+0 or
Ctrl+0. I am going to close the Assignments panel and now let's look at this in Preview.
Do you remember what that was? That was Ctrl+W, right, even though my
cursor is blinking in the text frame. So there is absolutely no reason why you should
accustom yourself to how Adobe thinks you should work, how Adobe thinks the
panel dock should look or what the keyboard shortcut should be. You need to make
the program work according to how you like to work and that's why Adobe built
in all of the ways to customize both the workspaces and the keyboard shortcuts.