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Adobe InDesign: Feature Requests

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691 results found

  1. Image frame option 'fit to bleed'

    I'd like to have option 'fit to bleed' next to 'fit to frame' etc. options. So I wouldn't need to move graphic frame corners manually to bleed area.

    Not a major issue, but a little improvement :)

    17 votes

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  2. Allow Open Office files to be imported

    Open office is a popular format but indesign doesn't have a filter to let them be imported. All our contributors use Open Office but the only way I can import them is to open them up, copy and paste - and lose all formatting. Not EVERYTHING has to revolve around Microsoft, surely?

    16 votes

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  3. Proportional Scaling should be default.

    Images (vectors or photos) are rarely distorted (effectively). Images should scale via corners, and should require button action for frame cropping or distortion.

    16 votes

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  4. Pattern support

    I am surprised pattern support has not arrived for InDesign yet. I would like to be able to pick a repeating pattern or drop a png of a pattern in and select to repeat it vertically and/or horizontally within a frame.

    16 votes

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  5. Please make the Paragraph Style Options panel resizable

    When on a laptop, opening the Paragraph Style Options takes almost the whole size of my laptop screen. There is no way to resize this, and it is almost impossible to view the effect of the changes you are making.

    15 votes

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  6. Group Layers

    It would be an easy but valuable addition to be able to group layers in InDesign like we can do in Photoshop. That would allow various "versions" of a document to be turned off an on, as well as organizing more complex documents. We can group paragraph styles and swatches – why not layers? Palette items should be groupable across the board, for a consistent interface.

    15 votes

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  7. DataMerge icons/images inline into text frames

    Add the ability to put file paths for icons/images with text in a cell, so that the images are merged inline with the text in a text frame. For example "Here is some text and here's an @icon.ai" would merge the icon.ai file into the text.

    I know a lot of people who do work on card games using DataMerge, and this is the single most frequent request I get.

    Currently the way we get around this is by merging text with placeholders like "[icon]", then copying the icon to the clipboard and doing a find and replace [icon] with…

    15 votes

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  8. Allow snapping and dynamic guides to work on the pasteboard

    I know guides snap while in the pasteboard and as long as they're infinite but many of us have to work outside the print area by several reasons including the use of many objects or several options that you put next to each other while working on the fly.

    Seems to me that its absence is a limiting non-feature that we learned to work with but it doesn't take too much resources to include.

    15 votes

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  9. Preserve positioning data when pasting graphic from one frame to another

    When I copy an image from one frame and paste it into another, I expect this action to preserve two sets of attributes: scaling factor and positioning data.

    I get one out of two (scaling).

    No offense, but QuarkXPress could do both back in 1990.

    Why does this matter? Imagine a layout with a horizontal row of head shots, each in a separate frame of the same shape and size. Client says, "Oh, please move photo 3 to frame 10, and scoot everyone else up one frame."

    I don't have to imagine this situation, as I'm currently working on a…

    14 votes

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  10. We need an Adobe product that creates charts better than a MS product!

    Years have gone by without Adobe recognizing that InDesign is used for a LOT of annual reports that are chart-heavy. Built-in functionality in Illustrator is appalling at best, then to have to break a chart apart and literally re-type every label for potentially 100+ charts for a report is ridiculous. We need the ability to control the look and feel of a wide variety of charts natively (with the ability link to various data sources -- spreadsheet, odbc, etc.).

    Alternatives?
    Use Excel and export as a PDF and link it. However edits are onerous when you have to change the…

    14 votes

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  11. Effects styles similar to Photoshop?

    For example, I have a better looking set of values for drop shadows besides the default. However I have to manually enter these in every time, no way to save them as a preset. It would be nice to at least be able to copy the saved style preset from an object to another, similar to the way you can in Photoshop.

    14 votes

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  12. Multiple Cursor-Positioning

    Multiple positioning of the cursor so multiple lines can be edited at the same time

    14 votes

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  13. Borders on cells in a table

    When adding a border (a stroke) to a cell-style for a table, I think it would be very usefull you can actually align the position of that stroke towards the cellframe. Like, for text-frames or image-frames you can choose "inside, outside or in the middle". For tables/cells, you can not. I often have to use a paragraph style with a paragraph border to get "more accurate" results. My screenshot will explain better.

    13 votes

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  14. Placeholder Text Feature

    Seeing as InDesign has interactive PDFs in mind giving us the ability to create forms easily and then export them as a PDF to open in Acrobat, I feel like a feature to inset placeholder text to fields shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

    To clarify, I was hoping to find an option under the Buttons and Forms toolbox that allows us to check off a box for placeholder text so when someone types in the field the original text there is overwritten with the new content. Like a "W" for width and an "L" for length in field boxes…

    13 votes

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  15. Multiple strokes like Illustrator has

    InDesign should have the ability to have more than one stroke on an object the way that Illustrator does. I've wanted this multiple times and now it's come up again with a design that uses a filled frame behind a headline and also a stroke inside the bounding box of the filled frame. To make this design efficient in production, the ideal is for this to be one object with the type in the center, the stroke a controlled distance away and another stroke that is the same color as the fill outside the first stroke. See attached screen shot.…

    13 votes

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  16. Outline Mode, like Illustrator does!

    Hey team! How about an outline mode like illustrator? A simple command that show you everything outlined in your artwork, that would be great if you're working for pre-press. I always had the feeling that indesign should have this feature to make easier QA process!

    13 votes

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  17. Split and even out footnotes in a two column layout

    We work on academic books, and academics love footnotes. When working with a two-column layout, the footnotes of each column appear at the bottom of that column. So far so good. But when there are a lot of footnotes things get messy, one column can be 50% filled with footnotes and the column next to it can have only 1-2 lines of footnotes (or even none). This doesn't look particularly nice.

    We are wondering if there is a way to even them out?

    I know it is possible to set the footnotes in one-column, but that doesn't look good. Would…

    13 votes

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  18. remove image from links panel

    In the Links Panel, it would be very handy to remove an image that is listed simply by right clicking on it and removing it.

    For example, I just manually removed over 500 images from image frames using the direct select tool. Theoretically, I could have selected those 500 images in the Links Panel, and removed them in the right click menu.

    13 votes

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  19. Allow footnotes start not on the same page as their marker

    Indesign is strictly forcing the rule that a footnote should start on the same page where its footnote reference is located. While this is usualy helpful, sometimes it creates problems like large white areas or even complete inability to layout the text.
    See for example the images below. Image 1 shows how indesign can't put any text and leaves white pages - actually the layout stops here and no text is viewable on next pages.
    Image 2 shows the reason: there are 2 footnote markers on the same row, both with long texts on the footnotes. so when the text…

    13 votes

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  20. Layer nesting facility

    The ability to nest layers within layers would be lovely. See image attached - it's a point of sale artwork example which has Adidas shoes and Nike shoes on separate layers with sub-layers for the prices and images - it has a common background on a separate layer. I'd like to be able to nest the 'image' and 'price' folders within each brand folder - this would really help negotiate files can contain up to 20 different brand folders .

    Thanks in advance.

    13 votes

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