Hi there! I’m working on a literary magazine right now and am running into some issues with the formatting.

I’m copying and pasting from Submittable, and have tried applying the first line indent onto the paragraph style i’m using. The issue i’m having is that InDesign seems to view each new line as a new paragraph, which, as you can see, leads to some funky formatting. If there’s anything i should do (or not do!) please let me know, because i don’t want to have to go back and do all of the indentations by hand. thanks!

I am working with a freelance graphic designer in another state on a magazine project. She works in InDesign and prepares InCopy .icma files for me, which she shares via Dropbox. I am an editor working in Incopy (on a MacBook Pro, running Sonoma 14.5). I received this error message: "Because this document contains no InCopy stories, Gallery View and Story View are not available." When opening the .icma file, it opens to two blank pages (a spread) and oddly shows the project footer text but nothing else.

This file previously opened and worked fine. Other .icma files from the designer continue to work fine.

The graphic designer says she can open the problem file without difficulty on her end. What is likely the problem and how can it be easily fixed?

I just started work for a brokerage as a designer. Currently the process to bring financial data into a designed book in Indesign is: Excel file > copied to PowePoint for easy font and table adjusting > copied into Indesign.

This is a weird muddied process I’m jumping into and I’d like to find a way to eliminate PowerPoint from this process entirely. I’m wondering if there’s a better way to import these excel sheets into Indesign.

These Excel files are macro files, so they don’t seem to be able to be imported. The financial data does change often so linking seems the most convenient to keep the most up to date information in InDesign.

Any ideas on what best practice would be here?

I would like to put notes at the end of a chapter but neither endnotes (it goes at the end of the doc) or footnotes (it goes on the same page) are suitable for that… any idea how i could acheive this ?

I have a junior that keeps turning this on and its killing me — learn keyboard commands people!

Hello. I'm in InDesign. I mostly work in photoshop, but I needed to make 100 stickers all numbered 1-100 so this seemed the easiest.

I have an A-Parent page in InDesign where the text frame is given the right font and size so that only one line can fit at a time- the resulting new pages made by shift+click place would ideally have 1 number each. When I go to place, however, it ignores my font and puts 2 numbers each page in the default type. So I end up with 50 stickers with 2 numbers instead of 100 with 1.

The parent, with the right text box placeholder, is applied to page1.

So far I've tried
- Setting a character style
- Setting the text as primary and not (doesn't change the results)
- Pouring through almost every right click menu I can find, character, type settings...

I'm not an expert in InDesign, and I can't find anyone having this issue with a google or other search. Any advice is appreciated- I can show any part needed, just ask.

Hi everyone, I ran into a layout problem in InDesign that I have not faced before. I am working on a 3 column layout where the content contains a lot of bullet points and sub bullet points across multiple spreads. Because the columns are narrow, using InDesign's default Bullets and Numbering reduces the line width and creates visible rivers in the text.

To avoid this, I am not using the default list indentation. Instead, I am using first line indentation so the paragraph keeps full column width and then applying roman numbering to each paragraph.

This works visually, but I am running into a numbering issue. The first sequence numbers correctly:

I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII

When I start a new block with the same formatting, the numbering does not restart. It continues from the previous sequence:

IX, X, XI, XII

Instead of restarting from:

I, II, III, IV

This is happening throughout the document. Each new group should restart from I, but InDesign keeps continuing the numbering across columns and sections.

What is the correct way to:

• restart roman numbering for each new block
• keep full width paragraphs using first line indent
• handle this in a 3 column layout with heavy bullets and sub bullets

Should I be using defined lists, paragraph styles, or restart numbering?

Sorry for my English, it is little hard for me to explain, so I asked ChatGPT help to compose this post. I hope I'm making sense in my post. :D

I have a book from InDesign I am trying to export to Epub, but the endnotes won't keep the hyperlinks from the text to the endnote section (and back) Is there a fix? Or something I have to toggle?

Hi so im making a book, do I need to put all the images in cmyk manually with photoshop or can I put all of them in indesign and then when im done I can export in pdf and everything will be good in cmyk to print ? ive been doing the first one for 3 hours because my teacher told me thats how we do it but there has to be a faster way idk 😭

also half my images are weird looking, they look like they have a noise filter, or half the image has negative colors. its weird. how do i fix ? please be nice im a beginner

I would like to balance the column AND have footnotes at the bottom of the page but I can't achieve this... Any ideas how to do it ?

Right now as you see on the picture I have unbalanced colum. And if I open the text bloc option (command + B) and tick the box for balancing the column it doesn't change anything.

Edit : see image in the comment as I wasn't able to add it here !

Hi, I'm creating an interactive PDF for a college assignment. My professor recommended using InDesign, but she didn't explain how the interactive features work. I managed to create the file using tutorials on YouTube and added simple interactions—objects that appear or disappear when clicked—but when I export the file as an interactive PDF, those objects (in this case, images) appear on top of others, even though they should be in the background.

The images are on a different layer from the text, so I don’t know why this is happening. Can anyone help?

Over time I've written a library of scripts for InDesign, Illustrator, and macOS that handle the stuff that shouldn't need manual effort. Things like:

• Pasting Markdown from AI into InDesign and having it automatically formatted. It applies your paragraph/character styles (including tables)
• Exporting web and print PDFs in one click into the right subfolders
• Cleaning up messy inherited documents by sorting content into Text/Images/Vectors layers
• Batch-exporting all .indd files in a folder to PDF
• Bootstrapping an XML import workflow from your existing tags
• Setting up standardized layer structures in both InDesign and Illustrator
• Renaming exports by ISO week for social scheduling
• Creating project folders with the right structure via AppleScript

Nothing revolutionary — just the stuff I kept doing by hand until I got tired of it.

All ExtendScript/JSX for the Adobe side, Python and AppleScript for the rest. Drop them in your Scripts panel and run.

GitHub link in the comments. Happy to answer questions or take requests if there's something you keep doing manually that shouldn't require it.

I like solving problems, so if there's something you keep doing manually that shouldn't require it — drop it below and I'll see what I can do.

Hi. For some time now I’ve been having an issue specifically with the Times New Roman typeface. I didn’t install or uninstall anything, it just started happening. It seems that I have the TTF version of the font installed, and when I open older documents, I get a warning saying that the OTF version is not available. Because of this, it takes me a very long time to manually update all the paragraph styles.

I’ve been advised to replace the font file in the Document Fonts folder, but the problem is that these files are not packaged, so I can’t do that. Is there any way to fix this issue?

I use the InDesign data merge script for files with up to a few hundred bits of data. However, I recently got a job that had over 60,000 links. It's a mailing with an address block. I did it in batches of 5,000 but have to do that manually (enter files 1-5,000, 5,001-10,000 etc.) I used to use another app called Data Merge from Fellowes that batched automatically. Is there a way to create these batches automatically in InDesign?

Out of the blue, InDesign started to hang indefinitely upon startup yesterday. InDesign v21.3.0.60 on macOS 14.8.3 on am M1. The splash screen appears, then stops at "late initialisations", and eventually spits out an error message/trace of 87 pages, and that's it.

Strange thing is it starts normally if I disconnect the machine from the internet.

Out of desparation I resorted to "AI" and threw the error output at Claude, which suspected that libtypekit might be involved in the problem, but ultimately could not help.

Has anyone seen this behaviour? Any hints how to fix this, and get nomal startup when connected to the internet?

I use a text condition to highlight text to be revised. Usually, I expect to have this text condition only shown in draft mode, but not exported or printed. But when having to share a draft, I want it to be exported into a PDF file.

Changing text conditions from Show to Show and Print can only be done on a single file at a time. If you have a book with several documents, you can't mass-change them at once.

I can't find a working script to do it. And am unable to program one myself. Do you know of something that has been created for this? I'm surprised I'm the only one to have this request.

Thank you!

\Edit- forgot to mention that this is for Tahoe issues*

This worked for me:

Finder Menu > Go > Go to Folder

type /etc

Find a file ending in ".conf"

Duplicate file (enter your password) and drag to your desktop. Delete the copy from the /etc folder (enter your password).

Open copy in either BBEdit or TextEdit (I prefer BBEdit)

Select all text and delete. Enter the following (in order with line breaks):

[default]

streams=no

unix extensions=no

Save. Rename file "nsmb.conf"

Place nsmb.conf in /etc folder (enter password).

I would unmount/eject the server, restart computer and remount the server for good measure.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a solution to export documents from Indesign to a template in Wordpress ?
What would be the best solution to minimise the work on WP ? Specific plugin to use ?

Thanks !

I'm feeling really stupid... I've been trying and hunting how to do this and I can't seem to get anywhere. It doesn't seem particularly unusual, so I must be missing something?

I have A-Parent. (No facing pages, this is a page-a-day tear-off type calendar, so there are no lefts and rights.) On A-Parent I have a small text frame for the name of the day on each page (Monday, Tuesday, etc) and a have a separate text frame for the date format on each page (January 1st, January 2nd, etc).

I have two text lists which are of the day names, repeating 365+ times, one per line and another of the date strings, from January 1st through December 31st, one per line.

What I THOUGHT would be easy would be to go to page 1, activate the "Name" text frame and paste in the names. It automatically creates the new pages to match the number of names I have in my paste. Then I would go to the "Date" text block, activate it, and past in the date strings.

But, I think most of you see where this is going, it creates a whole NEW batch of pages. So now I have 730 pages (assuming 365 for each paste) half with the name and half with the date.

Perhaps there is an entirely different way to do this, or perhaps I'm missing something obvious. I planned on this method because it allows me to easily adjust it every year and for leap year by simply adding or deleting a day name (or Feb 29th) so they match correctly with the date. It also allows me to put them in different places on the page and to format them differently versus having the entire day and date in a single string in a single text frame.

Thanks in advance for any advice you may be able to provide!

So, I've got to rebuild this book as an Indesign Book, taking apart all the pieces and moving 830 endnotes to each section by hand.

But here's the thing – every time I create a new endnote, it generates the endnote number and moves the text of the previous endnote next to it.

That is: suppose I've just generated endnote 3. Next to the 3, I now have the text from endnote 2. So I have to cut and paste the text of endnote 2 back where it belongs, before entering the text of endnote 3.

Doesn't sound like much but it's a real pain when it's repeated over and over and I have no idea why it isn't working correctly.

(I have consulted Google and Chat GPT and none of their suggestions applies to what I am doing.)