InDesign Settings You Should Change Immediately

InDesign was built with designers in mind, but its default settings need renovations.

Adobe’s InDesign is the default layout tool for most publication designers. It’s not hard to see why. In recent years especially, InDesign has blended its features more seamlessly with the rest of the Adobe Creative Cloud, so that crossing over among the different apps has become less and less necessary. And InDesign’s tools specific to paginated work are mostly excellent (though we still miss QuarkXpress’ additive leading).

Unfortunately, many InDesign users fall victim to the app’s default settings. Some are merely inadequate; others are actively harmful. Here are the settings you should always manually adjust before starting a layout:

1. Hyphenation. This is InDesign’s worst fault. Open any blank document and your hyphenation preferences look like this:
   

   

   If you’re using rag text, this is a terrible start. As outlined in Quarto’s post about hyphenation, these default settings break three of the most basic rules: no 2-letter breaks, no ladders, and no hyphenation across columns. You may have your own preferences about breaking capitalized words, but at the very least, you should adjust your settings to be more like this:
   

   

2. Type settings. These are found under the Preferences menu (InDesign>Preferences>Type). If you find your “Use Typographer’s Quotes” and “Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs” selections turned off, turn them on at once. Most well-designed typefaces will contain glyphs for both prime marks (used in the USA to denote feet and inches) and quotation marks and apostrophes (punctuation marks). These are different and they are not interchangeable. If you need to insert prime marks into your document, unfortunately, there is no method other than temporarily turning off Typographer’s Quotes until your marks are entered, and then turning it back on again. It’s maddening but it also matters.
   

   

   And in over 20 years of InDesign use, I have never once found a reason to apply leading to individual lines in a paragraph. That this is an option doesn’t compute.
   

3. Units. For some reason, Adobe expects you to prefer increments of 2 when using your keyboard shortcuts to alter text size, leading, or tracking. Changing size and leading by 2 points instead of 1 is basically harmless, if peculiar, but tracking a line of text in or out by a factor of 20 is dangerous. Tracking is a useful text fitting practice, but it should be done with care and infrequency. Letterspacing is a key factor in readability; adjacent lines of text that differ in letterspacing by more than 20/1000 ems — depending on the typeface — create a disjointed reading experience. You should track each line in a paragraph to be as close to a neutral setting as possible. That’s unlikely when adjusting by increments of 20/1000 ems. Change the increment to 5 or 10.
   

   

Fortunately, InDesign does offer a permanent fix, at least for the type and unit settings. With no document open, adjust your preferences to reflect these changes (and any others that you want to make permanent) and voilà! All of your new documents will reflect your new preferences. Sadly, hyphenation settings require a text box in a live document in order to make changes. So be sure to add that step to your style sheet checklist (you are using style sheets, aren’t you?).

And here’s a bonus tip for more advanced users: use the settings below to introduce a GREP style that prohibits a hyphenated phrase (“hi-fidelity, “pre-moistened,” etc.) from hyphenating again. It’s a pain to correct these on an individual basis. Use the software to make your life easier and give yourself more time to design.

There’s more where that came from. Get in touch with Quarto Creative for tips to ease your workflow and improve the all-important details: contact@quartocreative.com.