Please consider the addition of a dynamic unit of measurement that relates to the document’s baseline. Such a unit will make it possible to express various parameters throughout the design as a multiplication or division of the document’s baseline.

We would for example be able to express a header’s leading as twice the number of baselines, or a paragraph’s space after in any number of baselines.

The unit’s relation to the document‘s baseline means that it’s dynamic: whenever you change the baseline, all values expressed in this unit will change accordingly. There will be no more need to adjust these parameters manually.

I work with books, some of them very long and complex. Because I'm strict about styles and consistency, and because the authors rarely are, I have to use Find/Change a lot. It is by far the part of InDesign that I find most lacking.

1. Instead of clicking to get to find format or change format options, pick from drop-down(s) right there on the F/C dialog. At least for styles (but ideally also for fonts, swatches, etc.).




2. Search multiple styles at once (but not all styles, as happens when you don't select one in the find format area). For example: find any italic text in the Semibold Caption, Semibold Caption Wide, or Semibold Caption Narrow paragraph styles and change it to Semibold Italic character style without having to do the search 3 times. Another example: When there are several paragraph and/or character styles that came in from an older version of the file or from a Word document and you want to make sure they're not still applied anywhere, you could choose all of them in the find format drop-down rather than having to search for each individually.




3. Have a "not" option in searches, so we can search for any text (or whatever) that is NOT a certain color, size, etc. For example, find italic text that is NOT in the Body Italic character style, or find any text that is not black (i.e., has any swatch applied other than Black). Especially when there are a lot of things you don't want, such as colors, having to search each one separately is frustrating and eats up a lot of time.

3b. Add an "or" option. For example, instead of having to search separately for each of several words or characters that need something done to them, be able to enter them all in the search field with something between them that means "OR," or be able to add more search fields, each with something different in it. I'm sure I could use GREP to do this, but if it's only being done once it's not really worth the time and effort. I run into this when there are multiple spellings of a name and I need to make them consistent, or when several different terms throughout a book need to be changed to one other word.

1. ID should be able to remember what's already been dealt with during a search, even if I do something outside the search dialog and then resume. Example: In authors' files there is often text that has italic applied but should not (maybe they changed a word from italic to regular at some point but didn't know the punctuation was still italic) so I can't just have InDesign change all italics to my character style. I have to search the whole document and address each result indivdually, which is fine. I like that level of control. The problem is that if it finds something italic that should not be, I have to skip it (Find Next) because if I click in the text and change the format of that result, when I resume searching ID will, when it gets to the end of that story (or file, if I'm searching multiple files, as in a book) search all the previous results in the story/file before going to the next one.




2. A related request is that there be more than one action possible in the change part of the operation. For example, if I'm searching for italics, I'd like to be able to click a Change-1/Find button to apply my style, a Change-2/Find button to apply None, and a Change-3/Find button to apply my semibold italic style.




3. Each of the buttons in the Find/Change dialog should also be triggered by a key so I don't have to use the mouse every time I don't want to do what I did to the last result so can't hit return/enter.

In the background task palette the progress is shown by a growing bar plus a percentage number (double feature for what reason?).

But there is not enough space to display the full file name and the name of the exported file (screenshot 1). Even if you enlarge the palette (screenshot 2) the only change is a bigger progress bar – and no change within displaying the file names.

Yes, I know: the full file names are displayed when I do a mouseover, but expanding the fields of the file names if you expand the whole palette would be a small but smart development.

I use Indesign to create accessible PDFs but there are a few features that should be there.

TABLES
Automatic Header Column and Header Row tagging. At the moment Header Column is recognized but not Header Row. If this was implemented you could go a step further and add ID tags and scope automatically. This would be a huge time saver since this all has to be done manually in Acrobat. It would also be nice to have an option to specify the Title of the table as a caption tag.

FOOTNOTES
At the moment you have to add the proper tags manually and move them to the proper place.

LINKS
Please add an Alt tag area when creating a link. Even word has that.

ARTIFACTS
For some reason even when you tell an object to be an Artifact in InDesign, it still comes out as an untagged element. This is a huge time sucker especially when it comes to large publications. Having to go through the Content pane in Acrobat marking unmarked elements is a pain! All lines, rules, and shading should automatically be marked as an artifact by Indesign.

ARTICLES
When you export a file to PDF and tell the Articles panel to Use the Reading Order in Tagged PDF, you still have to select all pages in Acrobat and tell it to Use Document Structure.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Telling your TOC to use proper TOC tags. I don't understand why this is not built into InDesign already.

Thanks for listening,
Shane