Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced Tutorials
Customizing the Interface / Customizing Menus
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced / Customizing the Interface / Customizing Menus)
A number of people that I speak to about using InDesign aren't aware that you can really customize the menus and that's these menus over here in InDesign. There's huge customization you can do here and it can be very useful. Let's go to the Type Menu here. If you look down here there's an awful lot of items and if you're looking for something you say, oh, I know it's here but where is it? I do it all the time. You'll probably see me in the tutorials go to the Object Menu and say, oh, where's Corner Effects, and I'll whiz past it and above it before I find it again. I know it's there but because there's so much I'm looking at everything and missing it. So what you can do is trim it down by getting rid of the items you don't use and for that we go to the Edit Menu. It's the same on the PC and the Mac here, and we'll go to Menus. We can go in here and customize them. Here we have all the Menus, Edit, File, Layout, Type, Object, Table, et cetera. These ones up here. And you can go through and change them. I'm just going to go to the Type Menu and experiment with it here. Here we have the item on the Menu, Visibility and the Color. Now if I go down I can look at some things. If I don't work in a group I may not want Notes or Track Changes so I can just simply come in and turn these ones off. If I don't do large documents I may not use Footnotes or Hyperlinks and Cross References. Text Variables I may not use. Bullets and Numbered Lists, well, I can do that from the Control menu. Don't need it here. Insert Special Character, well, I do use those ones a lot. Glyphs I use the Control Panel, so as you can see I can just turn them on and off as I need them. Now if there's one that I miss all the time I could change the color. Hey, let this one stand out in yellow because I miss it all the time. And Find Font, I use that one all the time for my missing fonts, so I'll change the color on this. Now what we've got to do is save this so if I click on OK here it does do it, but it changes the default. So if I go down to my Type Menu there you can see it's a lot shorter now and there I've got the options highlighted. Thinned out a little bit because I don't have the option here in Create Outlines, but if we go back into our Menus again here, here you can see it's a modified InDesign default. So what we need to do is save this to something we can use. We can Save As, and I'll just call it VTC Menu1. Click on OK and that way now if I come in to change this a little bit, now let's go to Glyphs, I've allowed it back in here a little bit. Size, I don't need that because I'm going to change my size and the character from the Control Panel, but the Tabs, I really do want to highlight so I'll choose Blue for that, and notice it says VTC1 Menu, or VTC Menu1, Modified. I can save it and that now becomes the VTC Menu. Click on OK, go to my Type Menu and there we have the highlighted ones, and again, things we don't use we don't have to. We can always revert to the default by going back into our Menu and choosing InDesign defaults like that. Notice all these come back on again. Click on OK, and that's it. Any Menu, any item here, turn it on turn it off. If you don't use it turn it off and that way you're not having to deal with so much clutter.
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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