Split Windows in InDesign

Useful but oft ignored is the Split Windows feature in InDesign which gives two views of the same document. For example, one pain in the neck of working in InDesign is when highlighting the text to change the text colour it’s difficult to see the new shade without turning off the highly. That’s because all colours are inverted when selected as can be seen in the screen shot below, the text looks purple in the screenshot but in actual fact it’s green. Most people deselect to view the new colour which can be time consuming if you want to skim through a number of different shades to find the right one. There is an easy solution to this known as Split Window in InDesign.

Highlighted Text with Inverted Colours

So how can you preview your text colours without committing a number of selection acrobatics? One of the things shown on the InDesign Training Courses is a neat little feature known as Split Window which is ideal for previewing text colour amongst other things.

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Adobe InDesign Training -Using Grid Layouts

Why use a grid layout in InDesign? Although many designers like to ‘break the grid’ and work without the best designers will have already put in many, many hours already working within grid rules before opting out. Grids provide the solid structure, the flow of the document layout, they are the skeleton that the flesh of position and balanced are based on. They naturally guide the eye across the spread, draw its attention to a specific piece of content.

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Adobe InDesign Tip 2 – Placeholder Text

Following on from last months InDesign Tip of ‘Live Distribution’ this week we take a look at the various ways you can personalise your workflow a little more by tweaking with InDesign’s Placeholder Text Feature.

Placeholder Text

Did you know you can select which language type set you want your placeholder text displayed in?

Position your cursor in an empty text frame

Hold down Control & Select fill with Placeholder Text from the Type Menu

A placeholder option box pops up giving you the choice to fill your frame in an alternative language format

Click OK to apply

Create your own Placeholder Text

Create a text document in Word or Notepad

Fill it with the text you want to appear as Placeholder

Save and Name as Placeholder.txt in to your InDesign folder

Return to InDesign

Insert Placeholder Text into Text Frame as usual

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