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Indesign users! I'm Marcus from Adobe and I heavily use Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop since I'm a classic graphic designer. I always loved the way you can import and mask images directly inside an object when placing them in Indesign. But what I don't like is setting up grids, not for typographic layouts but more for presenting, so think about Bento grids or block grids in general.

I made a working prototype of a free Bento Grid plugin for Indesign that lets you adjust sections, corner radius, spacing and also the units in real time. I want to know, if you would use this too - please let me know and I will prepare everything to ship the final plugin for Indesign. Thank you so much!

*Note that this is not an official plugin from Adobe, even though I work there. It's more like a fun project to help with my personal pain points and improve my workflow in the apps.

hi! i have to use InDesign for a work project but I think im going to lose my shit if I have to deal with this program any more.

whenever i move any image, it gets cut off along the boundaries of the original position. there's a blue box and a red box and when i try to move the picture, it gets cut off based on what's in the blue box. is there any solution other than redoing all four points of the blue frame every time I move an image to see what it looks like?!?

Hi everyone! I’m a proposal manager for a midsize AEC firm. We are moving over from formatting documents etc in Word to InDesign. Our new company templates have already been built and for the most part I have the hang of being able to type and edit content directly in the templates as well as export to PDF during production.

We’ve had minimal training during this transition, however, and I basically need to learn the minimal basics to most efficiently do my job for the time being. I don’t need to start from scratch since we already have templates with the necessary links, etc, but can anyone recommend some beginner YouTube videos or other tutorials that can help me transfer content/drafts over from Word as efficiently as possible?

Edited to add: a glossary and/or quick reference guide(s) would also be very helpful! I have a nice keyboard shortcut reference sheet but half the time don’t know what each shortcut actually does…?

Please also be realistic but kind as I’m doing my best. I absolutely want to learn as thoroughly as possible in the long term, but I’m in a time crunch for the time being. Thank you all very much!!

Hello all,

I am an IT guy who has a user that is having issues printing a document. Basically, on certain lines, the right side of each character is cut off. The printer is a Canon iF C5140 and the user has a Macbook Pro M4 Max. One interesting thing to note is that printing from InDesign works fine; it's only when exporting to PDF and printing from Preview that causes the issue.

I have tried using Preview to add a red line (like a strikethrough) to the text, and the line printed fine while the characters still had the same issue, which leads me to believe it might be an InDesign issue. If anyone can offer insight into what might be causing this, that would be greatly appreciated.

Greetings, I am looking for software that allows me to search for a specific text string inside IDML files generated by InDesign.

Does exists such software?

Thanks in advance!

AL

Why do people make things harder than they need to be? Also, no parent pages set up, or any type of page framework at all. It's perfect bound and there's no cover file built for it. Large full bleed photos running across spreads. Not only is that set up incorrectly, it is a very bad idea because stuff dies in the gutter of a perfect bound book. It's been a long time since I had to pick up a file worked on by someone else but this is garbage. Just an old graphic designer venting.

Maybe I'm over thinking this. I want to include a table in a book that will require it to be in landscape format because of the width. But I want it to print in portrait format like the rest of the book. So the reader would need to rotate the book 90 degrees to see it properly.

If I change that page orientation to landscape in Indesign, will it still "print" in portrait in a PDF?

Hello! I hope everyone is doing well!

I’m an university student majoring in Design. Over the last two semesters, I’ve fallen in love with editorial design and would like to pursue a career in the field. I’ve used InDesign for a few projects before, but now that I’m on break, I’ve decided to dive deeper into the software.

I’m currently taking the InDesign Essential Training course with David Blatner on LinkedIn Learning, and I’m really enjoying it. Afterward, I’m thinking of taking the Designing a Book course with Nigel French, as I believe it covers the process from start to finish. Are there any other courses or tutorials you’d recommend? Bonus points if they involve working on a project, as I find I understand things better when I’m actually building something.

Thanks!

Hi! I’m trying to resize a family tree in InDesign from 2A0 landscape to A0 landscape without cutting off any content or losing readability. I’ve tried several methods, but I can’t seem to get it right. Would anyone be able to help me figure this out? And if someone could make the necessary modifications to the file for me, I’d really appreciate it. Thank you!

I have a black logo in my document that is a placed Illustrator file. It is 100% black. When I export the file to pdf for print it remains 100% black. But when my colleague opens the same file and exports it to pdf the logo changes to 4 colors.

I’m trying to understand the color settings and such (not my strong suit unfortunately) but as far as I can tell they are the same. I know there are workarounds like placing a tiff or copy pasting directly, but I want to understand the root cause to avoid anything similar going forward.

Anybody have some insight?

Hi everyone,
I’m working on a family tree in Adobe InDesign. The document is currently in 2A0 landscape format, and I need to adapt it to A0 landscape while keeping the entire family tree visible, maintaining its proportions, and making it as readable as possible.
The problem is that when I change the document size from 2A0 to A0, part of the family tree gets cut off or disappears outside the page.
The family tree itself is currently approximately:
Width: 4756 mm
Height: 866.095 mm

Convert the document from 2A0 landscape to A0 landscape (1189 × 841 mm)
Keep the entire family tree, with nothing cut off or missing

I am working on a personal project, and I don't understand what's happening. I imported a PNG image into the document, added some text and all that, and when I export project as a PNG, it just becomes super dull, like all the colors are gone. The color profile is sRBG, the original art was exported from the art program as sRBG- I can't figure out what's going wrong.

EDIT: I figured it out. For some god-forsaken reason, ticking "Set transparent background" in export fixes it. I cannot comprehend how this relates but- sure, I guess.

Using in design 2024. is like this on every view mode, the only way to fix it is to 'relink' all the images even tho they are already linked. It will not let me export it until all the images are 'relinked'. it's driving me up the wall.

So I work for a company that recently acquired a competing company and they’ve yet to be fully integrated into our server system. Sometimes they send me InDesign files of content through OneDrive for me to integrate into our proposals. Regardless of the size of the file they are sending, it causes my InDesign to lag once open. The same issue happens if I copy assets from their file to paste into mine. For example, I copied over a text box to reformat and drop into my document and now the file will lag and freeze for several seconds rather frequently. As it is, it’s unusable. Performance steadily deteriorates the longer I have one of their INDD files open in InDesign and does not resolve until I close out of it.

What I’ve tried:
-“save as” with new file name, close and reopen. Did not work.
-Save as IDML, reopen, save as INDD. Did not work.
-Open PDF of file in InDesign and allow to convert. No longer lagging but not the most elegant solution.

I’ll admit I’m not the most tech-savvy but I’m flummoxed as to why these files from this user are locking up my InDesign. I regularly work with huge documents and get content from our various studios with zero issue. Not sure if there is some setting checked or what. Would love some advice on what could be causing it or what else I could try to get the INDD file to function correctly. Thank you!

Hi everyone, I'd like to design a guided journal for print. Going for a whimsical vibe, featuring my own illustrations, gold foiled details on the cover.

I've designed digital journals before in Canva, and I illustrate in Fresco & Photoshop, but I've never truly learned graphic design, so I'm constantly feeling like an imposter 😅 Does it make sense to learn indesign/affinity publisher for this? Or do you think I can get by using Canva?

Also, has anyone here experience working with journal manufacturers? I've researched some options (mostly Chinese) but having a hard time telling which ones are good. Did you simply order a lot of samples? Grateful for recommendations or literally any kind of advice from your own experiences with similar projects.

This feels like a massive project but I really hope to be able to pull it off somehow. Thank you!

I think I may be forever bad at formating books, and the only reason being - it takes me days to format just a 300 paged cute girly book, the worst I've done is 9 days, and my high score has been 3 days. And even when on this Typa tasks, I don't even have a plan to format the book gradually from beginning to end. I just go ahead and do what comes to my mind - unorganized.

Or maybe it is because I'm still a baby designer, learned the skill like 27 30 som days ago. Someone please lemme know. how was it when you started? and Do you have a formatting steps you follow when formatting a book? I'm terrible, currently I just clean manuscript, setup the page, place it, and do whatever comes to mind 😅

Hi everyone,

I’ve created CalenClick Pro Advanced Plugin, an extension for Adobe InDesign and Illustrator that helps you generate complete, print-ready calendars in just a few clicks.

It can create:

• 12-month calendars automatically
• One month per page or artboard
• Calendars in any language
• Custom colors, fonts, spacing, and layouts
• Holiday lists assigned to the correct months
• Different colors for each month

The goal is to save time on repetitive calendar design while keeping everything fully editable inside InDesign or Illustrator.

I’d love to hear your feedback. What features or improvements would make this more useful for your workflow?

Literally how much longer do I need to endure this horrible splash screen I don't think I can make it to October. Wtf kind of art even is it supposed to be?

I want to create a visual list of all the styles in my document. So far, I've created a new document with several paragraphs of placeholder text, then applied each Style and labeled each paragraph with the Style name. It would be nice to also have the basic attributes listed as well (font & size at minimum). Is there an easier way to do this?

In 20 years of using indesign I have never had this problem which emerged yesterday.

I have a font family (.otf) installed that I have used for years without issue, it has 5 weights. I’ve always been able to select the typeface in the appropriate place, and the weight in the dropdown box below that.

As of yesterday, the font is still installed (currently have just been using fontbook on this computer) and all 5 weights are there, but showing up in fontbook all as weight “regular” and 4 of them are not accessible via indesign. Currently it defaults to the italic rather than the actual regular.

Does anyone have any suggestions of how I could resolve this?

How can I remove this icon from my frames? It doesn't appear on all images, just some of them. I don't know why. I have tried turning off Generative AI in preferences but it still appears. I really don't need InDesign to force AI descriptive text in the work I do and I don't want this added clutter. It doesn't print and only shows in 'Normal' layout view, but I'd prefer not to have it.

So a client I have updates a Google Sheet every other week that looks like the sheet here. The goal is to get it to look like the list on the ad built in InDesign. The formatting takes ages and there's just gotta be a better way than doing it all manually. Does anyone know the best way, or just an easier way to transfer this information?

I made a number style, and the second time I used it, the numbers picked up from the previous use. (1,2,3,4) then (5,6,7). I want the next list to start at 1. “Level” is 1.

When I change the mode from “continue…” to “start at”, “1” is the default, and everything is numbered 1. Or whatever I put in that field.

If I change “Level” to 2, I get a new option: “restart numbers…” at any previous level. But nothing seems to change.

I know this is a thing that works, restarting numbers, but what am I doing wrong?