Adobe InDesign is the world's most popular professional page design program. Today, many non-designers are expected to use InDesign to create great documents. Many impressed with the quality our clients created, but can say that the user could have gotten better results with less effort if they only knew these tips. You may know a few, but you probably don't know all of them.

• Using Paragraph Styles 

Many have seen some pretty elaborate documents that didn't use styles. The creator of the document simply highlighted the text and then manually selected the font, size, weight, colour, etc. Using paragraph styles would have saved them a lot of time and made changes easier. And creating a paragraph style is easy.

Whenever you want a paragraph with all these attributes, just select it in the Paragraph Styles box. And if you want to make a change, all you have to do is edit the style, and all occurrences will change. Have you ever had a document that should fit on two pages, for example, and it has overflowed 5 lines? You can customize your paragraph styles simply by editing your paragraph styles like other students learnt from indesign classes online.

• Why use Based on None 

When you are creating a fresh new paragraph, the default one will be Based on is the paragraph you modified to create the new one. If you leave it this way, any changes you make to the Based On paragraph style will be reflected in all other styles based on it. For example, changing the font based on style changes the font of any style based on it. For this reason, most professionals change the base to "Style without paragraph" unless they intentionally want the styles to change together.

• Optical, non-metric, for kerning 

Would you like the character spacing to look optimal? Select "Optical" instead of "Metric" in your kerning option. Better to do this in your paragraph style, of course. It's in "Basic Character Formats." Go to "Kerning" and select "Optical". Trust me; your boy will look better.

• Optical alignment 

We used to call it "pendant score". When you enable this feature, periods, commas, hyphens, and other punctuation marks move outside of the left and right margins, making those margins appear more square. It is particularly useful with fully aligned text and narrow columns. It never hurts to activate this. Go to the top bar and choose Type History, and check the box next to "Optical margin alignment".

• How to make a font bold when you don't have a bold font 

Sometimes you need an additional bold font and have chosen a font that doesn't have any. Highlight the characters you want to make bold. Select "Stroke" in "Windows". The first point is the "weight". Choose .25 or .5, or enter any number until the characters are the level of boldness you want. If the bold type is clumping characters too much, go to the box just below "Optical / Metric" and use the newly highlighted letters to increase the line spacing by increasing that number until it seems appropriate. If you need to use this a lot, you can convert it to a paragraph style or a character style, depending on your needs.

• Hyphens? 

For justified text, you may want to leave automatic hyphenation on. However, for irregular text, you may want to turn it off for a more attractive "rag". If your text contains a lot of very long words, you may want to keep hyphenation turned on, but change the setting in your paragraph style. You have a paragraph style, right? Make sure to edit the style of the paragraph.

If you are new to InDesign too not able to understand then approach Indesign courses online. Go to Hyphenation and increase the minimum number of letters the word must have to say 10. You can also change the minimum number of letters that can be preceded or followed by a hyphen. Give it a try until you see what you like—another advantage of the styles.

• Switch between normal and preview 

This setting is found at the bottom of the symbols on the left. Most of the time, it will work in normal preview mode. This view shows the page outline, text blocks and bleeds areas, etc. However, if you have bleeding images or just want to see how the page will look in the final document, you need to turn on the preview. This will show the page as it will print after trimming. You can find that part of an image is cut off. You can fix that.

• Display Performance  

The default setting in InDesign for how the video display presents documents to you is Typical Display. To be fair, this is a holdover from the days when computers had limited graphical display capabilities. Most new computers can handle the High-Quality Display settings. In "typical" images, placed PDF files and other graphics appear pixelated. Change the setting to "High Quality", and everything will look good. You can find this in View Display Performance. Select "High-quality display". If your computer can't handle this, you can always switch between the two.