InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 3. Getting InDesign Ready to Go

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Knowing where preferences are stored

• Setting preferences for documents and the application

• Customizing keyboard shortcuts, menu options, and workspaces

• Setting defaults for documents, text, and objects

• Creating default colors and styles

• Changing the view scale

Although you may not realize it, Adobe has made a variety of educated guesses about the way you work. For example, it assumes you work in picas, that you prefer low-resolution previews of images, and that you use typographers' quotes. Adobe has also made decisions about the default properties of text, the default color swatches included with documents, and the default attributes of some objects. In all cases, Adobe tried to make the defaults appropriate for most publishers.

But no matter how much thought Adobe put into making these educated guesses, they don't work for everybody. In fact, it's unlikely that every single setting is appropriate for you. So no matter how tempted you are to jump in and start working, take a minute to prepare InDesign for the way you actually work. Otherwise, you end up conforming the way you work to InDesign's decisions, making it more difficult to learn the program and get your work done; or you end up making the same changes to document after document, wasting time in the process.

Working with Preferences Files

InDesign stores preferences in several places. Some are stored in the documents themselves, so they work as expected as they are moved from ...