The Preferences here are pretty much set for what we need. Let's go ahead and click OK. And the next thing we want to look at is the layout of the palettes on screen. Now this is something called a workspace. This is your work area inside of InDesign, and in fact Photoshop, and the Illustrator, and GoLive, will all have the same function. Now the layout of the palettes that comes default with InDesign is okay. It gets you started, but it's not my preferred layout. So we're just going to make a few changes here. At the top part of the screen you have what's called the Control Palette. This really is your main control center inside of InDesign, and reacts according to which type of tool or element you have selected when you are working. So currently we have got the main Selection tool active. This is the black arrow at the top of the Tools Palette.
If you went across and may be selected the Type tool, you can see that the control palette now completely shifts and gives you options to control your type. Now this is broken down into two separate items. The Character options at the top and the Paragraph options here at the bottom. Now the reason I am showing you this is just like the main preferences we set up, if we have no documents opened at this point in time, and we make changes to the control palette selection here, again that will remain from this point on. The first thing I want to remove here is Hyphenation by default. So if I go ahead and turn that off, that will never appear until we tell it to. So we have control over Hyphenation rather than InDesign switching that the other way around. Now that I have selected, let's come back across to the main selection tool, and then come across to the palettes on the right hand side where we want to make a few changes. Now the default palette that's visible here is the Pages palette, and we want to make one change in this before we start moving them around.
If you come up to the flyout menu here the top of the pages palette, and there is one of these for almost every palette inside of InDesign. Come down to where it says Palette Options. Now the reason we are doing this, is when we open a document, it's divided into two sections. You have Master pages, and you have Regular pages, and they appear at the top and the bottom respectively. The icon that shows up for a page is round about half an inch in height. So it sits here in the center of the page's palette. Below that you have pages two and three and then pages four and five and everything else almost is kind of lost down here, and you have scroll around to find them. The same applies with the master pages. You get one or two pages in here, and there's not really enough room until you have to start scrolling around.
Well the palette options allows you to change that by making the icons all Small. So the pages icon will now be about a quarter of the size they were. The master page is the same, and turn off the Show Vertically options, that now means that the pages will preview from side to side, and that doesn't mean in this default area you can view about 20 pages in one go, instead of just three. So that's definitely one you want to check as a main preference. Now click OK to exit that. You will notice there are couple of palettes stored here inside this cluster as well. If you click on the Layers palette or the Info palette, they're all brought to the front as you click on them. The pages and layers are a couple of things that we may use simultaneously throughout the training. We don't want to have to keep flicking back and forth between them.
Well, what we'll do instead, is click on the word layers, and drag that palette out on to its own. And you can see it's very easy to do, and this how you start customizing your workspace. So I am going to click back on to pages here, and leave that selected in the foreground, because I want that to be always visible. The layers are currently standing out here on its own. Let's make a couple of other changes over here on the right hand side. We have got the Object Styles Palette over here. Let's click to expand that. Below there we have Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, and then Swatches, which is kind of a color selection thing and shouldn't really be inside the styles. If we go down to the lower right hand side you can indeed see the Stroke, Color, Transparency and Gradient palettes, and these are effectively the color options. So what we can do is, we can take Swatches here and simply drag it from one palette cluster, straight down into another, and that now stores it inside this lower area. So all of the color palettes are here. All of the style palettes are here, including the new objects styles, and layers is now set out on its own.
What do we want to with that? Well, instead of having this palette floating around on screen, it is possible to get this wonderful sliding in and sliding out option that the palettes have here on the right, over here on the left. There's a lot of empty space here that we could reuse by placing palettes in a different location. Now all you have to do is take the Word Layers. Now don't pick up the gray bar at the top. Lot of people do that and pull this down, stick it at the side of the screen, and it doesn't actually go anywhere. You must take the word layers to pull the tab off the palette, and notice as you drag towards the very edge of the screen, it will snap into a vertical palette that can now be clicked on to expand, and clicked on again to contract. Now I am just going to slide it up by clicking in the gray area so it snaps up there below the Tools palette, and even drag the bottom section down here just to expand its height, and then open it up again. What we are going to do, is put a couple of extra palettes inside here as well. Things that we might need fast and easy access to.
Now all of the palettes are stored under the Window menu. And the first one we going to go down and choose is Links. Always handy when we are looking at images and graphics that have been placed into InDesign. Now again, just select the word Links, and this time drag it over into the Layers cluster that will be stored over there on the left hand side. Let's go back up to the Window menu, and come down to the Text Wrap option, and do exactly the same. Take that palette, drag its name over into the cluster on the left, and now we've stored three separate palettes in this one location. Now make sure the layer is the top most selected item, bring it to the foreground, and then we'll just click it again to collapse it off the left hand side.
We're basically setting a default here for the layout of the palettes. Now another one we might use in a little while is called the Story Palette. So let's go back up to the Window menu. Go straight down to Type & Tables at the bottom, and a little bit further down there you will see a Story option. Only a small palette, but very important when it comes to text layout, and especially to style sheets. So we may as well drag that over here into the right hand cluster, where the Paragraph object and Character styles are stored. Now I am just going to click back on to Paragraph styles here to make sure that's the default selected one. Click to close it. Come down here to the Colors palette, just click to slide that one off the side as well. Now what we have done now, is customized our interface to give us access to palettes, but we also want to make sure that this workspace is saved, so we can call it back at any time in case we move the palettes around again.
Now if we go up to the Window menu, come down to the Workspace sub menu, you will see there is access to the original Default layout. What we are going to do is choose Save Workspace. Simple little dialog box comes up, and you can called that whatever you want. I am going to call this workspace number one, because I may decide to save many, and simply called it Main layout. If you go ahead and click OK now, and return back to the window menu, Go down to workspace, there you can now chop and change between Default and Main Layout. To go ahead and just give it a try, Go to Default, and you can see that InD
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