Optical alignment and the oddball, single-function Story palette

Tucked away in InDesign's Window menu is a Story palette. This palette has exactly one function – to turn on and off optical margin alignment.

You can find the Story palette at Window > Type & Tables > Story. There are two settings. The first is a checkbox to activate optical margin alignment. And the second alters the intensity of the alignment.

Optical margin alignment automatically adjusts the positioning of characters on the margin. It's especially noticeable for punctuation and letters like "A" and "W" which look a little odd lined up exactly on the margin. See the example below.

Optical margin alignment. Off (left) and on (right). Notice how the quotation mark and the lower case "w" move in relation to the margin.

I'm not sure why Adobe didn't just include it on the Paragraphs palette. Seems odd to hide such a powerful feature on a random single-function palette.

Almost every Wednesday, I post a tip on an Adobe app.

Highlighting bad lines

InDesign can highlight lines of text that are spaced badly. By default, the highlighting is turned off for justification issues. To turn it on, go to InDesign > Preferences > Composition... The highlighting options are at the top of the window:

Turning on "H&J Violations" will highlight in yellow any place where InDesign can't meet your hyphenation and justification settings. Here's an example of a block of justified text with hyphenation turned off:

The worse the violation, the darker the yellow highlight is. Here is the same passage with hyphenation turned on:

Obviously, allowing InDesign to hyphenate and handle the bad breaks results in much better spacing.

I try to avoid full justification because of the issues that almost always come up with the spacing. But sometimes, you have to justify. And when you do, it's easier to spot and fix badly spaced lines with the highlighting turned on.

Every Wednesday, I post a tip on using an Adobe app.

InDesign Presentation Mode

InDesign CC 2014 adds a new screen mode: Presentation.

You can enter Presentation mode in a couple of ways. From the menu bar, select View > Screen Mode > Presentation. I often to use the button at the bottom of the Tool Palette to switch screen modes. And if you are a keyboard shortcut person, "shift+W" will do the trick. (Don't worry, pressing "W" by itself still gets you into Preview mode.)

So, what is Presentation mode? It hides the palettes and toolbar and displays only your InDesign document surrounded by black. You can page between them using arrow keys. Or you can click to advance and shift-click to go back. It's very similar to Full Screen Mode in Acrobat.

Presentation mode will be helpful when showing artwork to clients and coworkers. And if you are like me and build "PowerPoint" presentations in InDesign, it will be nice to preview your artwork in full screen mode before you export to PDF.

Could you actually use InDesign to show a presentation? I suppose you could. Although it seems clear to me that isn't Adobe's intention with the feature. Users can add transitions in InDesign that export with a PDF file. Those transitions aren't shown in Presentation mode. If Adobe intended for you to use this mode to show presentations, they would have supported transitions. For building presentations in InDesign, your best bet is still to export a PDF and present in Acrobat.

On Wednesday's, I post quick tips for Adobe apps.

Grouping Colors in InDesign CC 2014

The new versions of Creative Cloud are out, and InDesign has picked up a few new features. One of the minor tweaks will be really welcomed by obsessive compulsive designs.

InDesign CC (2014) now lets you group your colors into folders. Just click the folder icon at the bottom of the Swatches palette to make a new color group.

While it's a small thing, having the ability to group colors will be helpful or large and complex documents.

Every Wednesday, I post a tip for an Adobe app.