Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced Tutorials
Customizing the Interface / Preferences pt. 1
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced / Customizing the Interface / Preferences pt. 1)
In this chapter I'm going to talk about customizing InDesign. Now there's a lot you can do with the Interface to customize it to your own personal needs and we'll go through it over the next few movies. I'm going to start off with the Preferences. Now if you're on the PC you'll go to the Edit Menu and the Preferences will be located down here at the bottom. However, on the Mac you pull down the InDesign Menu and then you go into the Preferences. However, Mac and PC, once you go into the dialog box they're exactly the same, just how you get there is a tad different. Now there's an awful lot here. As we scroll down you can see there's Panels and Options about everything here. I'm not going to go through these one by one because I'll probably put myself to sleep never mind you, but some of them we've already seen if you watched the Beginning Tutorial on InDesign. For example, Spelling, we went through that, and other ones we'll be going through as we go through the tutorial. So I'm just going to cover the first two and the object here is to give you an idea of what is in the Preferences and how you can change it as opposed to showing you absolutely everything. So, anyway, let's start up here with the Page Numbering. Here, if I pull down this Menu, you have two choices: Absolute Numbering and Section Numbering. So I'm just going to Cancel out of here and go over to my Pages Panel here and see how the numbers go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Let's make them a little bit bigger for this option here. Again this is something else that really is customizing as well, you can see the numbers there. However, if I go into Preferences, General, Section Numbering, click on OK and then pull out this Panel you can see it goes 1, 2, and then it changes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in lowercase Roman Numerals and that's because we created a Section here on this and if we go to the Section Numbering option here you can see that we're starting the numbering on this particular page and using Roman Numeral styles. So you can have these pages show either way. Let me just go back and change it here back to Absolute Numbering, click on OK and when I pull out this Menu you can see that after Page number 2 there's a comma and that just indicates that there's a change in the Section Numbering here. So that's one of the things you can do there. If we go back into our Preferences here and we go to our General tab you can choose how it embeds the fonts here. This is a huge number - 2000 glyphs within a font - some fonts do have that many, but not many do, so if a font is larger than this in the number of glyphs it has it won't include all the fonts, it'll just include 2000 of the characters so that's what that is. I've never had to change that one. Here we have a new one in InDesign CS5 and that's the Prevent the Selection of Locked Objects. So, it's selected, so if I come down and select this one, go to my Object Menu and choose Lock Object here, and come over I can't click on it, it's not there for all intents and purposes as far as the mouse is concerned. This is a change in InDesign CS5. You used to be able to select it. If you liked the way it was in the previous versions you can go back in, turn this off, click on OK, and that way you can select this. You can't really do anything to it, you can't move it, you can't resize it, but you can select it. And this was done because a lot of people complained that it really wasn't locked because if you'd nothing selected and you drew a marquee like this you'd end up selecting a locked object. So let's go back to our General Preferences here. I'll turn this back on because I like the new way a lot, and we'll take a look at When Scaling. We've got two choices here: Apply to Content, Adjust Scaling Percentage. So I'll just click on OK here and if I select this, let's take a look at this box here in the Control Panel. This is our Scaling Proportions here and if I just scale it here like this you can see it's 135 percent, click away, click back, it's 135 percent of the original size we placed it. Let me undo that, take it back to 100. Then I'll go back into my Preferences, General, and I'll change it over. I'll choose Apply to Content. Click on OK, select it, 100 percent, scale it. This time I'll go down a little bit. Select it, still 100 percent. Come back here, click on it, it's always 100 percent. So with this option it just resets it every time, however, this is just the frame. If I double-click in here and click on the Content, the Content is always scaled. I've effectively got the Selection Tool selected here by double-clicking on it. So, the Content will always be scaled relative to its original but if we go into our Preferences and look at Apply to Content it'll never change. If you want it to always change choose this option here. One last option in the General dialog box is to Reset All Warning Dialogs. So, you know, when you click on something that says: Are you sure you want to do this?, or this is going to happen - if you've turned them off and you find that you actually really like the warnings because sometimes it helps. One that I like is Overset Text when you're going to Print because you're missing something sometimes. You can always reset them by clicking here. We will take a look at the Interface Panel in the next movie and that's the last one we'll do in these Preferences and we'll, as I said, we'll just take a look at these other ones as we go through the tutorial as is appropriate.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced |
| Author: | Brian White |
| SKU: | 34168 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-55-0 |
| Release Date: | 2010-10-13 |
| Duration: | 10 hrs / 133 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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