InDesign Best Practices – Before You Begin
Before automating InDesign, which we explain in this post, it’s important to keep in mind the best practices for InDesign, which generally include:
- Use linked graphics. Don’t paste images into InDesign, and don’t embed them.
- Make sure that you don’t have duplicate fonts, or fonts of the same family but different types (e.g., .ttf and .otf versions of the same font family).
- If you’re sending the document to someone else, or even moving it to another of your machines, always use the Package feature to create packages. This way, you have all of the fonts and linked graphics needed to work on the document.
- Avoid overlapping text wrap boundaries. Ideally, don’t use text wrap unless it is absolutely necessary. When text wraps overlap, they form inside-out wraps that can capture characters from overlapping text frames.
- Use layers to separate content into easy-to-work-with blocks.
- Remove unneeded items from the pasteboard.
- Save early & often!
Follow Good Typesetting Practices
- Use styles. Ideally, every piece of text in your document should have a paragraph style applied to it, and every piece of unique formatting smaller than a paragraph should use a character style. Object styles, table styles, etc., make formatting easy to re-apply, and if needed, to change globally.
- Don’t enter return characters to add vertical space. Use paragraph space after and/or space before, instead.
- Don’t enter returns or tabs to force text into the next column. Instead, use a break character (they’re on the Context menu when the cursor is in text) or, better yet, use the Start Paragraph option in the Keep Options panel.
- Don’t enter space or tab characters to force line breaks. Use a line end character (aka “soft return”) instead (shift-Enter).
- Don’t enter space or tab characters to try to center or right-align text.
- Avoid common typesetting gaffes—straight quotes that should be typographic quotes, or double-dashes that should be Em dashes, for example.
Spacing & Leading
- Pay attention to the spacing settings in the Justification panel. The defaults are terrible, so change them to be more restrictive. You should not see wild variation in word and letter spacing from line to line in a paragraph or in a series of paragraphs using the same paragraph formatting.
- Watch your hyphenation and line breaking—you have to “walk the lines” to fix bad hyphenation points and widows/orphans.
- Avoid using autoleading for text. One place autoleading makes sense: standalone inline graphics. If you do that, set the Auto Leading percentage in the Justification panel to 100%. This makes the paragraph exactly the height of the graphic, so you can then add paragraph space after and/or space after as needed.
Other Settings
- Use text frame options to control the vertical positioning of text in your text frames. To display the Text Frame Options panel, press Command-B/Ctrl-B while you have a text frame or text selected.
- Use paragraph shading and paragraph rules, rather than drawing separate rectangles and lines around text. If you use paragraph formatting, the shading and rules will move when the text moves.
- Bring in layered background art as individual elements so that it can be adjusted, rather than one using one large background element.
- Plan for bleeds. You never know when you’ll need to extend objects off the page when the time comes to print the document.
