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Newbie InDesign question regarding size/leading increments.

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kzhessel

Technical User
May 11, 2005
4
US
I did a search and didn't see anything, so my apologies -- feel free to link me to the right place if this has been asked.

I see in InDesign that font size and leading are tied together in the preferences panel. IE, you can set the increment to 2, so that your keyboard shortcut makes the leading increase by 2, and another keyboard shortcut makes your font size increase by 2. You could change it 1, or 10 -- whatever you like. (There's also that x5 shortcut, so an increment set to 2 jumps by 10, and one set to 10 jumps by 50, etc).

While this sounds great, since Quark didn't allow control of this, does anyone else think these two settings should be independent?

In Quark, Shift-Option-Apple-Period, the font goes goes up by 1 pt. Shift-Option-Period, the font goes up by 12 pts. Excellent -- I don't ever want to fine tune my headline sizes by any less than 1 pt, while 12 points is quick and easy for scaling when things get moved around.

Also in Quark, Shift-Option-Apple-Quote moves the leading up by .1 pts. Shift-Option-Quote changes it by 1 full pt. Again, excellent -- when I'm fine tuning the vertical aligment of stories, I only want to shift the leading of a single paragraph a tiny little bit, no more than a few tenths of a point.

Now we get to InDesign. I can set my size/leading increments to 1 pt, which is fine for increasing and decreasing font sizes. But I basically never want to change my leading on newspaper body copy by a whole point!!! My alternative is to set my size/leading increments to .1 pt, which is great for leading, but I never want to adjust my headline sizes by only a tenth of a point!!!! Even using the other shortcut to multiply the increment by 5, I don't want to change my headline sizes by just HALF a point.

For sizes, we want a full point minimum, and multiple points for fast scaling.

For leading, we want a .1 pt minimum and a 1 pt maximum, for fine tuning. (Typing this in manually -- 10.6, 10.7, 10.8 until I get what I want -- is not an option!)

Is there ANY way in InDesign to accomplish this???
 
Open ID, do NOT open any documents, Preferences/Units & Increments, change the amount of leading to whatever you want, QUIT ID.

Now whenever you open ID, your amount will be the default. Do this for anything you want - h&js, strokes, colours, drop shadow, default font, paragraph styles, page format, etc etc etc.

If you have a document open these changes will only apply to that particular document. I always quit & reopen after making any adjustments, just to make sure that all my changes take effect.

Now go to user/library/preferences/adobe indesign/version 3.0/ and make a copy of "InDesign Defaults" and "InDesign SavedData". If InDesign starts acting up, all you have to do is delete the 2 originals, make a copy of the copies, delete the text "copy", relaunch InDesign & all your defaults will take effect. Saves a lot of time & frustration.
 
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