When to Watch Out for InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a very powerful layout program. However, all that power comes at a price: a steep learning curve. If you don’t understand how InDesign works, it can make life difficult for you. This article points out some of the pitfalls you can fall into using InDesign and how to deal with them.
The Tale of the Two Composers
One of InDesign’s major strengths is its control of typography. InDesign has several features that can make paragraph text look great automatically. However, these controls can also cause frustration. Adobe provides two controls for paragraph type, the Paragraph Composer and the Single-Line Composer. You access both by viewing the Paragraph palette menu. The Paragraph Composer adjusts text on both sides of the line you are working on, within the paragraph, to try to produce lines of text that most closely match your settings. The Single-Line Composer only adjusts the line you are working on. Most of the time, leaving the default Paragraph Composer on gives you good results.
If the Paragraph Composer creates an individual line of text that does not look good to you, you have two ways to fix it: adjust the Hyphenation and Justification settings for that paragraph only (which will change how the Paragraph Composer adjusts text), or switch to Single-Line Composer and edit that line. In most cases, switching to the Single-Line Composer for that paragraph is much easier than trying to get the Paragraph Composer to read your mind. But it also means that you now have most of your text set with the Paragraph Composer, except for the paragraph you didn’t like. If you later make any text changes to this paragraph, remember that it is still set to Single-Line Composer.
Unprintable Gradients
InDesign gives you many controls over color, including gradients. But Adobe also assumes that you understand printing enough to know when an effect won’t work. And you know what happens when people make assumptions. For instance, applying a gradient to body text, with its very thin strokes, will probably not print. If you come up with a design that makes you wonder whether it will work, please call us.
