From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Choose a better workspace for editing - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Choose a better workspace for editing

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- [Instructor] Before we go any further, I want to make a couple of important changes that will really help when it comes to editing my InDesign documents. First, I'm going to look inside the Workspace menu up here in this bar at the top of the screen, and I'm going to choose Advanced. Now, I know that sounds scary, but you don't need to be an Advanced user to use the Advanced workspace. It just means you get to see these extra panels over here in the dock along the right side of the screen. So, sure, I know you're just learning the essentials right now, but believe me, you're going to want all these great features in InDesign. And in this course, I'm going to be working in this Advanced workspace, so I highly recommend you do too. This Advanced workspace also gives me all the formatting features I need right here at the top of the screen in what's called the Control Panel. You'll notice that this workspace also hid the Properties Panel on the right side of the screen. Now, if you like using that panel and you're working on a large screen, you can go ahead and open it again by choosing it from the Window menu. But in this case, I'm going to leave it turned off because personally, I prefer using the Control Panel. You'll notice that the Control Panel and the Properties Panel both change depending on what you have selected on the page and what tool you're using. So for example, if I select an object with a Selection Tool on my page, the Control Panel both shows me and lets me control it's width, height, position on the page, scaling, and all kinds of stuff. But if I choose the Type Tool and select some text inside of a text frame, now the Control Panel changes. It shows me text formatting information. Now, technically, the Control Panel has two different modes. There's a Character Formatting Mode and the Paragraph Formatting Mode, and you can switch between them by clicking this A icon on the left or the paragraph character. I'll be talking all about paragraph formatting in a later chapter, but this is where you'd set indents, and drop caps, and stuff like that. Okay, I want to make one more important change that involves text. In this case, it's changing a preference. You see, in the next movie, I'm going to be talking about something called leading, some people call it line spacing, because it controls the amount of space from one line of text to the previous line. And in general, you almost always want the same leading throughout an entire paragraph. Otherwise, the spacing would look uneven and kind of odd. But here's the thing. InDesign default settings make it really easy to have inconsistent leading. Fortunately, you can change InDesign to work the way you'd expect, so that it applies leading to the entire paragraph evenly. Let me show you how. I'm going to open the Preferences dialog box, and I'll get there on the Mac by looking inside the InDesign menu. On Windows, you look at the bottom of the Edit menu there, you'd find the Preferences sub-menu, and I'm going to jump straight to the type preferences. Now, I know this is a little overwhelming, but there's a check box in here called Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs, and I'm going to turn that on. That's it. It's an easy change, but it's really important. In my opinion, Adobe really should ship InDesign with this preference turned on. Unfortunately, this change only applies to this one document, the one that's currently open, but if you change the preference while no documents are open, then it will apply to all new documents you create. Actually, while I have this open, I'm going to make one more change. I'm going to click Display Performance in the list on the left, and I'll change my Greek type below from seven down to, say, two points. That way, InDesign won't gray out small text on the page. That's just one more setting that I always change in order to work efficiently, and I'll be using these in the rest of the course. All right, now I click OK, and we're good to go.

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