Okay, let's start out here inside of Adobe InDesign CS2. Now the first thing you will notice is that there are no documents opened. I want you to make sure you are in the place. The reason for that, is the very first thing we are going to do is customize our entire layout and preference settings inside of InDesign, if we have no documents opened, and those preferences will be set permanently for every document we create from this point on.
Now the first thing we are going to do is change a few of the preferences. Now on the Mac it's up here under the InDesign menu. On the PC it's under the Edit menu. We go down to the Preferences option, go across and choose the General. Now the keyboard shortcut for that is also Command+K or Ctrl+K on the PC, and it will bring you to the very same dialog box. Now there are many preferences listed down the left hand side here, and we are not going to go through and change them all. I am only going to focus on a few very specific ones that will help us as we work.
First thing I am going to do is come over here and turn off the Tool Tips. They are only going to get in the way of what we are trying to work with here. By all means leave yours turned on, but I am just going to set mine to none at this point in time. And then come up to the Type option here on the left. I am going to select this item here. Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs. So when we are playing around with type and adjusting size and leading, we can't accidentally apply to just a single word or a character, and then end up multiple values inside one block of types. This is more of a little safety barrier. Now one new feature of the CS2 programs is the ability for the type menu to show a preview of all of the fonts as you scroll them down.
What I am going to do is go ahead and turn that off, again, purely for speed and efficient working, disabling this option will make the Font menus much, much easier to navigate. Now the next item I am going to look at, is Units & Increments so go ahead and click that on the left hand side here, and there are two main things I want to change right now. The first thing is the Origin of the rulers. Now whenever we position anything inside of InDesign, and I do mean anything, we have precise control over exactly where the item sits on a page. However, if we have a two page Spread, and we position an item on the right side if the Spread, currently our measurements are taken all the way from the far left hand side of the first page. Well, this is because our Origin is set to Spread, across as many pages as make up the Spread from one zero point.
What we are going to here is change it to Page. Every new page whether it's part of a Spread or not, will have its Ruler origin reset to zero on its upper left hand side. Now this is something more of a preference that you and for me, the Horizontal and Vertical ruler units. How you want to see all of your measurements specified inside of InDesign, I am going to go ahead and choose Millimeters. It's a format I am very familiar with, but you do have access here to Inches or even Points and Picas if you want to. Now it doesn't matter really which one you specify here, because I am going to be using millimeter measurements throughout this training, but every time you type in millimeters, no matter what you have got you all set to, InDesign will convert it to your measurements. So don't worry about changing this to something you are not familiar with. This is only something I am going to do, you can follow along if you like, or stick with what you all used to. Now let's skip down a few of the items here on the left hand side and go straight down to Display Performance. Now InDesign does display images very clearly and very accurately. We are going to make just a couple of changes to make that even better.
Now we have three standard views inside of InDesign. We have a Fast display, Typical and High Quality, and we are currently going to edit what's called the Typical Display. When you are on Typical, if you import any Vector Graphic from Illustrator, it will only show a low resolution proxy. Well, the program is fast enough to cope with importing all of that Illustrator information. So let's go ahead and slide that up to High Resolution here on the right side. Also, this is one of my favorite options to change. Change the Greek Type Below, down to just one point. And that means that anytime you preview or type inside a document, smaller and smaller, and smaller overall, the type will turn into gray lines which is the term Greek Type.
Now we have done that only on the Typical display option. If we go across to the High Quality option, you can see that everything is high resolution here on the right, but Greek Type is still 7 point on this one. So go ahead and change that also to 1 point. Now the final couple of things to do, is come across to the appearance of Black option. Now this very important when dealing with color design inside of InDesign. When you create an item that's filled with just a 100% black, most people are under the impression that that's the darkest color that you can print. But this is not true. And this gives us an example here of what 100% black would look like if it was printed on a page. You can see it looks very slightly gray, as opposed to a black that also contains tints of Cyan, Magenta, and yellow underneath the 100% black. That's called a Rich Black color. A preference here inside of InDesign CS2 as well as Illustrator CS2, gives us the ability to display all blacks, no matter whether they are at the standard 100% or the Rich as Rich. And personally I don't agree with that. I would like to know if my colors are going to output looking slightly washed out purely because I used the wrong swatch.
So up here, I would suggest that we go ahead and say, Display All Blacks Accurately, and also when they print to a desktop printer, make sure they output accurately as well. So you can see the difference between Rich and Standard Black color, and we will see these in action a little bit later on. Now the final thing is down here the File Handling option. We are going to makes sure that we Always Save Preview Images with Documents, and we will see this action in the minute inside of Bridge. This means that the first page of our document with all of its graphics on will be saved as a preview that can be viewed inside of Bridge, and scaled up and down to see the details before we commit to opening that file or moving it elsewhere.
Now you have a choice of the Preview Size that you use. We can go up to a 1024 pixels square, which is a very large JPEG image. Remember that whatever you're specifying here is saved with the InDesign document. So if you do have a 1024 square JPEG file, may be that takes up 500K in size, that 500K will be added to the size of the InDesign document as well. Now for this I am just going to choose Large, 512x512. That's probably decent enough to get a good enough preview. Now the other options to make sure we have turned on is Version Cue down here, just in case we decide to do any Version saving of our files, but again, we will take a look at that in a lesson later on.
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