From the course: InDesign Secrets
137 Sharing presets, workspaces, and custom shortcuts sets - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
137 Sharing presets, workspaces, and custom shortcuts sets
If you've been using InDesign for any appreciable amount of time, then you have probably created some custom settings for yourself. Settings that you would like to, say, transfer to a second computer that you're using, like a laptop. Or maybe you want to share with other people in your workgroup, put it on the server for other people to use. Like custom workspaces or saved find change queries and so on. I'm going to show you how to do that in this video. By the way, let me mention that if you're using InDesign CC, at some point, we don't have it yet in this computer, but at some point they're going to add a feature called Sync Settings. It'll appear under the File menu or the InDesign menu That will allow you to sync your settings to the cloud, and then you can sync them to another computer that you have associated with that account. I don't know if that's going to allow you to share settings, and besides which, if you have any version of InDesign earlier than CC, you're never going to get that. So this method will work with any version of Adobe InDesign as a way to share your settings and to also back them up in case of disaster. There's two main kinds of settings. One kind of setting is saved as individual XML files on your hard drive. These are actual files that you can take and zip up and put on a zip drive or something. And the other kind of settings are saved in this big mess called InDesign Defaults that will get wiped out if you ever need to rebuild your preferences, which is a very common troubleshooting technique. Let's talk about how you can back up or share both of these kinds of settings. For the kind that are saved as XML files those would be things like custom workspaces that you've created, scripts that you've installed in your user folder. If you've done any fine changes and you've saved fine changes like, remove old refs or make a company name bold or, I did one here called swap last name and fist name as a change. These things are all saved on your hard drive. The fastest way to get to them, here's a cool tip, is you don't have to start digging through your hard drive looking for your user settings folder. Just open up your scripts folder, even if you've never installed a script. Find where it says user, right click, and choose reveal. On the Mac, it'll say, reveal in finder. And a Windows machine will say, reveal in Windows. It's going to jump to the finder, to your OS. And it's going to select that. And if you back up a little bit, you'll see that here is the folder with all of your settings. In fact, here is the path, let me right-click here. So, on my Macintosh, inside my Home folder, inside the Library folder, Preferences, blah de blah de blah de blah. So look here, where it says the language, and here we have saved find change queries, saved work spaces. If you've created a custom keyboard shortcut set. All this stuff is saved here as little files, that you can share with somebody else. And they can take your files, and put them in the same folder on their hard drive. Just copy and paste, just like any other file. What I like to do is just duplicate this entire folder, so this Version 9 is the current CC version of InDesign, you'll see a folder for every version you've ever installed on your hard drive, and I've duplicated my Version 9 folder right here. And this thing I could just compress, and put onto some other media or upload to the cloud so that it's always at the ready. Or I can email to somebody and they can extract those work spaces, and saved fine change queries, and so on, and put them in the same folder on their hard drive. So that's how you deal with those xml file things. And the other ones all have to do with presets. In your InDesign File menu, go down here and look under adobe PDF presets, if you have any entries down here that don't have brackets around them, these are your custom PDF presets. So I have ones for different printers that I'm working with for different projects. You might also have presets for documents in the New Document dialog box there's a drop-down menu for document presets, so you don't have to keep entering all the settings for these kind of documents. And you might also have print presets when you're in the Print dialog box of printing different kinds of outputs that have different combinations of the printer and the paper and the so on. These things will be wiped out completely should you ever need to rebuild your preferences. And they do not exist as separate files that you can grab onto. Instead, the only way to back these up is to go to the define dialog box. Each one of these has a define dialog box, and then select all of your custom settings, so I am clicking on one, and then shift clicking on the last one. Choose Save, and save them somewhere on your hard drive. So here you can see that I've already saved AM's document presets. Do that for each one of those kinds of presets, and then, should somebody else want to use your presets, or should you ever need to re-install them, let me delete these to show you what you do. You would just go to your documents presets defined dialogue box again, this is what it would look like. And choose load rather than save. Grab onto those presets, click open and they all come back. Or give those presets to somebody else and they can load them and they'll get added onto their document presets already. So that's how you share these kind of presets and these kind of workspaces and find change queries and so on. All of your custom settings that you've done in InDesign, how to share them with each other and how to back them up for yourself.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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