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Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced Tutorials
Customizing the Interface / Workspaces
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe InDesign CS5: Advanced / Customizing the Interface / Workspaces)
I'm going to wrap up this chapter on Customization by talking about Workspaces. Now if you watched the Beginning tutorial I did talk about customizing your Workspaces there, but since we're talking about Customization it'll do no harm just to recap it a little bit here. So let's take a look at the Workspaces. Up here at the moment I just have all the basic Workspaces that were with InDesign when it came. If I click on one, like Essentials, you can see just a basic set comes out. They've got the Interactive Set here and Interactive for PDF and we'll see these ones as we go along. Printing and Proofing, here we've got a lot of extra ones here. But let me just go back to the Advanced. This is the one I use to start with. Now the thing to remember about these Workspaces, as you alter them and make changes to them it sticks, so even though this is called Advanced it is not the same Advanced that was there when you started InDesign. Let me show you what I mean here. If I pull down the window and choose Mini Bridge here, Mini Bridge comes out like this and I can dock it over here at the bottom. Say I use it a lot, which I actually do, and just want it located here all the time. I'll close it up. Now if I switch over to, let's say, Interactive, like this, and switch back to Advanced Mini Bridge is here. So, if I had Bridge out here, for example, open it up and resize it a little bit like this over there, now I switch back to another Workspace, I'll go to Book this time, then switch back to Advanced Bridge pops up here. So wherever I leave it when I switch back to this given Workspace, whatever Panels I have open and are using and the position they're in, that's what it's going to return to. If you do want to return to the default Workspace you can come down here and choose Reset Advanced. Click on it like that and by default notice that they're all out here with the names and the icons and because I know what the icons are I always drag this over and it stays like this. Let's go ahead and get my Mini Bridge out again here and this time I'm going to come over and dock it on the side here below it like this, and we'll pull something else up here that I'll add to this that we don't already have, and let me choose the Effects Menu. It's already there. That was a bad one, so let me come back and let's see, which one isn't there? Definitely the Align one isn't there, and I do use this one, so I'll drag it away from this one first because I don't want to use the Pathfinder so I'll close the Pathfinder and drag it over here. Now it's important when you're docking it, if I dock it in there it's going to dock on the bottom like that. Let's bring it out again, just drag it out like that to bring it out. However, if I go over to the side, there you can see the blue line like that, it docks in beside that and that can be a pain to get rid of because when I drag it out this drags away. I have to drag this one over, drag this one back here, and then come back and drag it at the bottom. So if you see that blue line coming in at the right-hand side you know that you're actually pushing it to the right of the existing ones. If you want it down here you just add it there at the bottom. Let me show you one other way. You notice these are all in groups? If I drag it into the group like this, can you see the blue lines coming onto the group like that? Drop it in there then it comes in this group with a line, Character Styles. In fact, I would want Character Styles in with Paragraphs Styles so I'll drag this up here and drag this back into Character Styles. I don't want it above the Paragraph Styles here so I'll make sure that the blue line is at the bottom. I hope you can see that. And there I've got these two together and because I used these in conjunction with each other I'm always going to want to have them there like that. I can take my Mini Bridge out here, drag it out, and then back in here and just put it in with the Align. There we go. I've got these together in these groups, that way they come out together. There's no logic of having these two together really, like we have for the Character and the Paragraph Styles. So you can go through, get the Panels that you use and then save your own set. We can choose New Workspace here and then just for originality I'm going to call this one VTC. And notice that there are two other options we have here: Panel Locations. That's exactly where they are. We want to capture that. And Menu Customization that we did earlier in this chapter. So if you've customized these menus and want it to be part of the Workspace you can remember these as well. You can also turn these off but I want them here so I will have the Panel Locations, the Menu Customization, click on OK, that's when I switch back to, let's say, Interactive here. I'm going back to more book work. I'll just go to VTC like this and there we have it out here. I can change it like this and it'll come up again the next time but if I need to reset it, just Reset VTC. So, this is the end of this chapter. Huge amount of customization you can do but if you use it carefully I think you'll find that it is just another one of those little things that will really help your workflow become more efficient.
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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