Chapter 3: Getting InDesign Ready to Go

Overview

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 won't work for everybody. In fact, it's unlikely that every single setting will work 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'll 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'll end up making the same changes to document after document, wasting time in the process.