Use with Caution

This article appeared in Issue 135 of InDesign Magazine.

With InDesign’s great power comes great responsibility. Learn how to use advanced features without problems.

InDesign is a well-designed, high-performance page layout beast. In the hands of an experienced user, it can chew through paragraphs and pages so fast you can hardly keep up. The power and depth of the InDesign feature set is astounding, enabling it to adapt to an incredibly wide array of layout challenges. But with great power comes great responsibility, as many of these features have some not-so-obvious “gotchas.”

Sometimes these pitfalls exist because of the sheer power of the feature—you just need to learn how to use it properly. Sometimes the feature is half-baked—developers incorporated it into InDesign but then never properly polished it. And sometimes a feature just doesn’t work the way you would expect for completely inexplicable reasons.

Here is your guide to avoiding problems while taking full advantage of these powerful features. First up: Be careful of your language settings!

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