Adobe InDesign: Feature Requests
When entering a new feature request, please provide:
1. Description
2. Why is this valuable to you?
Thank you.
776 results found
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Line-Based Paragraph Shading Option
Currently, InDesign’s Paragraph Shading feature applies shading across the entire width of the paragraph, regardless of the actual length of the text on each line. This often results in large shaded areas extending far beyond the end of the text, which is visually unappealing and requires complex workarounds.
Please add an option to apply paragraph shading per line, so that the shading extends only as far as the text on that line. This would allow for much cleaner typography, especially in cases like poetry, short line breaks, lists, or multi-line titles.
1 vote -
Preflight incorrectly flagging Adobe fonts as "protected"
Adobe InDesign's preflight is displaying an incorrect message whenever Adobe fonts have been used in artwork. The specific warning is "Fonts not allowed: Protected" and then suggests to change the font to something else.
I feel that Indesign is false-flagging these fonts as they behave differently to other fonts that are usually installed or referenced on a user's machine. If anything, the preflight shouldn't warn about them at all if they are correctly loaded.1 vote -
Snap Frame to Letterforms
Please add an option to align text frames by the actual letterforms instead of the font’s bounding box.
InDesign currently uses the em-box and sidebearings, which means misaligned text when trying to align separate text boxes that contain different styles or type sizes. This makes precise alignment for headings/subheads really frustrating.
Illustrator already allows bounding boxes that hug glyphs more tightly, so it feels like a big gap in InDesign.
Proposed solution: Add a toggle or context menu option (e.g. “Snap Bounding Box to Text” or “Align to Glyph Edges”) so users can switch between:
Align to Frame (current behavior)
…
2 votes -
Upgrade font selection dialog to match new Illustrator format and capabilities
The Illustrator team are upgrading the font selection dialog, so that there are now three versions: Photoshop's, InDesign's, and Illustrator's. At this point (September 2025), the Illustrator beta is the most capable and flexible.
1 vote -
AI agent for remembering text content style
I often work with instruction manuals that have been poorly translated, and I need to reword them so they read clearly and professionally. A lot of the content is similar across different jobs, and I’d like to stay consistent with how I’ve written things in the past without having to dig through old files manually.
It would be great if InDesign had an AI agent that could:
Learn my style and remember my text preferences (e.g. whether I use “kg” or “KG”).
Automatically reference past projects so I don’t have to copy/paste from older manuals and allow me to ask…
1 vote -
How to tell if a font has real small caps
Please can you make it easy to see if a font has real small caps before installing it?
1 vote -
Right-click "remove hyperlink"
Why can't Adobe do this yet? It is 2025 for God's sake. Removing a hyperlink is a multi-step process. It should be a simple right click. And I am talking about the actual hyperlink, not the character style. I already have a script that will remove unwanted styles with no active hyperlink beneath them. I just want a FAST, EASY way to remove unwanted hyperlinks that clients ALWAYS seem to insert, even though they know they don't want them included.
1 vote -
Add an “Empty Output” Option for Text Variables (Urgent Request)
Dear Adobe InDesign team,
As a professional typesetter/designer, I heavily rely on the text variables feature to automate running headers, footers, and other dynamic text in my documents. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to specify an empty or null output when a text variable evaluates to nothing. Instead, InDesign inserts the last used value or some default text. This forces me to manually adjust the layout or apply complex GREP styles to hide unwanted characters when the variable is empty.
Please add an “Empty Output” option to the text variables feature that allows the variable to output nothing at…
1 vote -
Add Ligature on/off button to the available space for the character type panel
Due to the recent update (June 2025), there is now an open space for another button on the character style in the Control Panel. The design with the additional space is throwing me off when clicking on Superscript. Adding a button for turning Ligatures on and off would absolutely make life easier. Right now you can turn on/off in character and paragraph style panels, or you have to go to the drop down Menu in the Character panel.
3 votes -
Integrate Optical Margin Alignment into Paragraph tab / Properties Panel
The Optical Margin Alignment sits as a standalone checkbox in the Story Window. It would make much more sense to have this in the Paragraph Widow, and in the Properties Panel. Hyphenation is a check box here, why not have the same thing for hanging punctuation / optical margin alignment?
2 votes -
Keyboard shortcut for Align Justify w/last line right
The default action in the Align Justify keyboard shortcut is to align the last line in the paragraph to the left (Shift+Cmd+J).
There is no keyboard shortcut to align the last line to the right. Please add it; it’s very important to my RTL text workflow.1 vote -
Typographer’s quotes need to be the default
I have been using InDesign since 2006. The so-called “typographer’s quotation marks” that are an option that needs to be activated in the settings menu are quotation marks. Set as default is a glyph denoting an inch. This cannot be used instead of quotation marks and why that even is an option in pro software is incomprehensible. Even though the majority of InDesign users will be typographers, it is unnecessary to create an opportunity for less knowledgable users to make mistakes. – It’s a relic from the typewriter keyboard where there was only one glyph available for quotation marks and…
1 vote -
Lockable Panels/Workspaces
Please consider adding an option to lock panel positions within the workspace, preventing accidental movement or rearrangement. This feature would be useful not only in InDesign but across all Adobe Creative Cloud applications for users who want to maintain a consistent and intentional UI layout.
3 votes -
Non-breaking Forward Slash Character
In addition to the existing “Nonbreaking Hyphen” and “Nonbreaking Space” options, it would be very useful to have a “Nonbreaking Slash” (/) character. This would prevent line breaks after slashes in certain contexts (e.g., dates, codes, abbreviations), improving typographic control.
1 vote -
Footnote Numbering Across Independent Text Frames
Currently, footnote numbering continues only within threaded text frames. It would be extremely helpful if footnote numbering could optionally continue across separate, unlinked text frames within the same document. This would allow for more flexible layout designs without breaking numbering consistency.
1 vote -
Allow ignoring white spaces in Find/Replace
it would be good if, the same way you can select "Case sensitive" in the find/replace, you could select "ignore white spaces" or "special characters" and only finds plain text with normal spaces.
For example, if you try to find a sentence that has non-breaking spaces, n-spaces, manual line breaks, etc, unless you add all those characters codes to the find field, InDesign won't be able to find the text. If you were able to ignore all those "special" characters you could find and replace the whole sentence with the text you want with normal spaces.
This would be really…
4 votes -
We need text variables whose values can change PER SECTION.
I'm mystified that there's no way to (for example) specify a name for a section in a document. "Section marker" is not a solution, because you frequently need to use that to display a section NUMBER (which should also be a built-in marker).
So I created a text variable called "section name," but found it was useless because there's no way to set a variable's value per section. Don't most document sections have names?
1 vote -
We need text variables whose values can change PER SECTION.
I'm mystified that there's no way to (for example) specify a name for a section in a document. "Section marker" is not a solution, because you frequently need to use that to display a section NUMBER (which should also be a built-in marker).
So I created a text variable called "section name," but found it was useless because there's no way to set a variable's value per section. Don't most document sections have names?
1 vote -
Automatic French Punctuation Spacing Based on Language Settings
In French typography, it is standard practice to insert a narrow non-breaking space before certain punctuation marks such as colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, and question marks. While InDesign correctly applies French hyphenation and dictionary rules when the language is set to French, it does not automatically handle these essential spacing conventions. This omission often leads to typographic issues such as widowed punctuation at the end of lines, especially in justified text. Currently, users must manually apply non-breaking spaces or rely on GREP styles and Find/Change routines to correct these. It would greatly enhance multilingual typesetting workflows if InDesign automatically inserted…
2 votes -
Numbering positions
I'd like to be able to place numbering AFTER text, such as "Recommendation 1.2" and be able to cross-reference that in the appendix as "1.2", but all of the work-arounds I've seen are very clunky and prone to issues with long report documents.
2 votes
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