Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
InDesign best practices
While completing the postcard in this lesson, you experimented with the basic
building blocks of a document and the best practices for creating a document.
When you create a document following best practices, the document is easy to
format, revise, and replicate consistently. Some of these techniques include:
•
Start with preflight.
As soon as you receive a document to work on, use the
Live Preflight feature to make sure the document will output correctly. For ex-
ample, if the document is missing a font, you will need to acquire that font
right away before you continue working on the document.
•
Avoid layering objects.
Format one object rather than layering objects. For
example, the three text frames containing the postcard's body text have a text
inset, stroke weight, stroke color, and drop shadow applied. An inexperienced
InDesign user might be tempted to create this look by layering multiple
frames. Using multiple objects creates extra work when moving and aligning
objects or changing the formatting.
•
Thread text frames.
Inexperienced users are often tempted to place or paste
text into separate, freestanding text frames. The text in these frames needs to
be selected and formatted individually. If you flow the text through threaded
frames, it remains as a single body of text called a story. Among other benefits
of working with a story as opposed to disjointed frames of text, you can select
all the text in a story for formatting and limit the use of Find/Change to the
text in a story. When working on a longer document, such as a topic, threading
text frames is crucial to controlling the text placement and entering revisions.
•
Use styles for all formatting.
InDesign provides styles for formatting objects,
paragraphs, lines within paragraphs, characters, tables, and table cells. With
styles, you can quickly and consistently format everything in a document. In
addition, if you make a change to a format, all you need to do is change the
style. For example, in the postcard, if you wanted to change the font used in
the body copy, all you would need to do is edit the Character Formats of the
Body Text paragraph style. Styles can easily be updated to reflect new format-
ting and can be shared among documents as well.
You will learn more about all of these features as you work through the lessons.
