It's about time I put InDesign through its paces. I've been neglecting Adobe's fantastic DTP package in favour of Illustrator.

For this exercise I'm going to show you how to create a table of contents in InDesign. In my experience this is a very useful thing to do. Not only do you automate the creation of a table of contents, but by creating PDF bookmarks you also make life a lot easier for yourself when you later come to format your document.

For this example I'm going to try something a little different. Rather than waste time getting you to create a book from scratch, I've taken the liberty of making the file that I use in this exercise available to everyone. If you wish to download the example file it can be found at:

http://europatraining.co.uk/Animal%20Farm.indd.zip

(Copy and paste this url into your browser window if the files does not automatically download.)


So let's begin...

1. For this exercise I'm going to be creating a table of contents (or TOC) for George Orwell's Animal Farm. As you can see from the screen-shot below, I've created a number of Paragraph Styles for the book. After we've created the TOC you can try out applying them to the text if you're so inclined.





2. In order to create a TOC in InDesign you must first ensure that certain Paragraph Styles have been applied to appropriate portions of text in the document. In other words, if you apply the Paragraph Style entitled 04 Chapter Header to every incidence of the word 'chapter' in the text, you can then tell InDesign to look for occurrences of that Paragraph Style and make a note of the page on which it appears.

You could do this manually, of course. You could trawl through the document and apply the Paragraph Style 04 Chapter Header to the beginning of every chapter of the book. I'm a lazy person by nature, however, and I'm going to let InDesign do this for me.

To do so, go to Edit> Find/Change... and ask InDesign to look for the word 'chapter' and replace it with the word 'chapter'. Confused? I don't blame you. As you know, this action will obviously make no difference to the document whatsoever. However, if you click the More Options button in the Find/Change... dialogue box, you can then access the Change Format Settings and select 04 Chapter Header from the Paragraph Styles pop-up menu.

So what we're actually doing is telling InDesign to look for the word 'chapter', replace this with the word 'chapter', and at the same time change the Paragraph Style to 04 Chapter Heading. I hope this is making sense to you.



3. So now every incidence of the word 'chapter' has been put into the Paragraph Style 04 Chapter Header. But what, I hear you say, if the word 'Chapter' happens to occur somewhere in the actual text? Don't worry about that just now. We'll get the opportunity later on to ensure that there are no glaring errors.

Of more immediate concern is the fact that our Find/Change... has ended up putting our chapter headings bang in the middle of the text in apparently random places as shown in the screen-shot below. What do we do about this?

My aim is to actually have all chapters beginning on a right-sided page. Once again, if I were not quite so lazy, I could scroll through the document and do this manually, using the 'enter' key instead of the 'return' key to force the chapter headings up to the next linked text box. However, once again I'll let InDesign do this for me.

In the Paragraph Styles palette double-click on the style 04 Chapter Header. In the resultant dialogue box select Keep Options, then choose On Next Odd Page from the Start Paragraph pop-up menu. Problem solved. All Chapter headings now start on a right-sided page. InDesign will even insert extra pages to automatically facilitate this. What an excellent program InDesign really is. I'm a fan.





4. Almost there. We've applied the appropriate Paragraph Style to every incidence of the word 'chapter' and we've got all our chapters beginning on a right-sided page. Now we go to Layout> Table Of Contents...

It's worth your while now trying a little cause and effect. The fields in the TOC dialogue box are fairly self-explanatory, I think. As a starting point you might like to use the settings that I've selected below. Remember, all we're basically doing it telling InDesign to look for the Paragraph Style 04 Chapter Header and make a note of the page numbers on which this occurs.

Please make sure that Create PDF Bookmarks is checked. This is going to come in handy very soon...



5. Click OK when you're happy with your settings and a loaded text icon will appear at your cursor position. Navigate over to Page 1 and click inside the text box on that page. Hey presto! A table of contents.

But it gets better...



Go to Window> Interactive> Bookmarks and you'll find a ready-made set of PDF bookmarks that link to every chapter heading in the document. Double-click on any of these and you get taken to that position in the document. You can now apply the appropriate Paragraph Styles to finish the book.

In the good old days when I worked in publishing, I've seen lazy subs take a whole day trying to finish formatting a document. Thanks to your PDF bookmarks you can do this in a couple of seconds. The Bookmarks palette is also the place to check for any errors in the document. If the word 'chapter' does happen to appear in the book's narrative you can now apply the correct Paragraph Style and go back to Layout> Table Of Contents... to update your TOC.





Hope you enjoyed that. Please post feedback. I get a little lonely sometimes.

Hello everyone on this lovely Summer’s day. This evening, in a wine-soaked stupor,  I’m going to be taking a look at one of InDesign’s most powerful and juiciest features. Nested styles appeared back in InDesign CS2 and I, for one, was excited by the possibilities of being able to nominate character styles to appear in any order or position in a paragraph. But then that's the kind of guy I am...

The following exercise is a real-world problem that I had to find a solution to a couple of years ago while working for a fairly big-name magazine in London. What the designers wanted was to have a paragraph style that began and ended with one line of a particular character style. At the time we were using QuarkXpress (sshhhssshhh!), which meant that we were had no choice but to manually apply character styles in a kind of hit-and-miss manner until we achieved the results we wanted. It worked – after a fashion – but InDesign, naturally, presents the more elegant solution. Read on...

1. For this exercise I’ve created a very simple A4 page with a two-column grid.



2. The next step is to create an equally basic body copy style. In this case I’ve named it ‘body copy’. No prizes for originality.



3. Now create a character style. In this case I’ve called it ‘ Red Intro’. It’s a very simple 12pt Arial Black, coloured red.



4. Next you have to create another character style that is identical to the ‘Body copy’ paragraph style. I’ve unimaginatively named it ‘body copy’. I hope that this isn’t confusing you.



5. Now we create a nested style. Alt-click the new button in the paragraph styles palette and head over to the Drop caps and nested styles pane. What I’ve basically created here is a ‘Red Intro’ sandwich.

In other words I have the ‘Red Intro’ character style applied to the next End Nested Style character; this is followed by the body copy character style applied to the next anything (it really doesn’t matter what you apply this to because you’re not really going to apply it, if you see what I mean). Finally, I have the ‘ Red Intro’ character style applied to another End Nested Style character.



6. The end result of this is that once you’ve applied the character style you only need to go to the Type menu and choose Type> Insert Special Character> Other> End Nested Style Here where you want the first ‘Red Intro’ style to end. And then you choose the same command at the place you want the Body Copy Style to end. And if you’ve done it correctly, this is what you get:

A very quick tip, this one:

If you're applying colours to a text box via the swatches palette hit 'j' to toggle between text colour and object colour.

Here's a nice Easter Egg available in the newest version of InDesign. Choose 'About InDesign' and then type the word 'Butterfly'. Do this carefully and you will get a reward!

How many times have you flicked throught a newspaper or magazine and noticed that text is not lining up across columns? While this is not a deal breaker it's ugly and lazy work, especially when it's so easy to set up a baseline grid and correct this problem.

Setting up a baseline grid is something that I normally do at the very start of a publishing project. A lot of designers try this and get deterred by the fact that their leading (line spacing) values tend to mess up. This occurs because InDesign's default baseline grid is set to 4.233mm (in other words 12pt or 1 pica) and if your leading happens to be more than this you end up aligning your text to every other line on the baseline grid. Too many designers get this far and then give up.

The solution is simplicity itself:

1. Set your leading and make a note of what is.

2. Go to InDesign > Preferences > Grids... and set the Grid's 'Start' value to whatever your top margin is for the page. Next set the 'Increment Every:' to whatever your leading happens to be. Make sure that you include whatever measurement unit that you are using (i.e. if you are using pts then type '14pt' into the field).

3. Finally, select your type and in the paragraph pane of the control panel hit the 'Align To Baseline Grid' button (even better if you can do this in the paragraph style sheets dialogue box).

Now you're up and running...

If you're a Quark user moving over to InDesign you may be a little perturbed by the fact that InDesign has the habit of locking all master page elements. The new user could spend a lot of time trying to solve this quandary, and may end up looking in the pallette menu of the pages to find the command 'Override all master page items'.

This, however, has the effect of unlocking all master page items, somthing that you probably won't want to be doing.

The best way of locally unlocking items is very simple: hold down Apple-Shift or Command-Shift and double-click on the item you wish to unlock.

Most people are aware that when using InDesign all you have to do is hit the 'v' key when you are in (almost) any other tool and you will find yourself back in the Selection tool.

This is great, and something that should become instinctive if you have been using InDesign for any amount of time. A major problem occurs, however, if you happen to be inside a text box when you hit the 'v' key. If you do this, you end up typing a 'v' into the text.

In years gone by I would get over this problem by hitting Command-Shift-A (Control-Shift-A on the PC) and this would deselect the text box, allowing me to then hit the 'v' key in safety. Nowadays, however I have a better solution:

Navigate to InDesign's Edit menu and select Keyboard Shortcuts. Under Product Area select Tools and find the Selection Tool in the list below. Under 'Context' choose 'Text' then insert your cursor into the New Shortcut field and hit 'Escape'. Hit Assign and then click 'OK'.



Simple, I know. But from now on whenever you happen to be inside a text box and need a quick exit just hit the Escape key and you're back in the Selection tool.

It's a big time-saver.

One of the questions that constantly arises, particularly from migrating QuarkXpress users, is how does one create an island spread in InDesign?

An island spread is three or more pages joined together, rather like the fold-outs that you sometimes see in magazines. In Quark this is very easy to do: you simply drag a page into position on the page layout palette and an additional page is created.

If you try to do this in InDesign, however, it just doesn't work. You drag a page into position in the Pages palette and it will invariably end up appearing at the end of the document. This can be annoying to say the least.

By default Indesign does not allow islands spread to be created in the Quark way. It does this to prevent a common problem that occurs in QuarkXpress: that of the ordering of pages becoming messed up. I've lost count of the number of times that I've seen inexperienced designers or subs totally destroy a document in Quark by turning right-sided pages into left-sided pages, and visa versa.

If you need to create an island spread in InDesign the solution, however, is simple. Simply go to the palette menu of the Pages palette and deselect Allow Pages To Shuffle. Now you can drag in as many pages as you like and place them next to an existing page.



But what if you want to do this and still prevent inexperienced users from messing up your documents? Simply select a spread and choose Keep Spread Together. A simple tip, I know (you out there listening 'Creative Guy'?) but a fairly essential one at that.