Set preferences (2024)

1. Choose Edit> Preferences> General (Windows) or InDesign> Preferences> General (macOS), and then choose the type of preferences you want to specify.

2. Choose a page numbering method from the View menu in the Page Numbering section. (See Display absolute or section numbering in the Pages panel.)

3. Specify a threshold to trigger font subsetting based on the number of glyphs a font contains in theFont Downloading and Embeddingsection. This setting affects font downloading options in the Print and Export dialog boxes.

4. You can determine how scaled objects are reflected in panels and how the content of scaled frames behaves in the When Scaling section.

   • Select Apply To Content if you want the point size to change when a text frame is scaled. (See Scale type.) If this option is selected when a graphics frame is scaled, the percentage size of the image changes, but the frame reverts its percentage to 100%. (See Scale objects.)

   • Select Adjust Scaling Percentage to display the original point size with the new point size in parentheses when you scale text. If this option is selected when you scale graphics frames, the percentage size of both the frame and image changes.

5. Click Reset All Warning Dialogs to display all warnings,even the ones you’ve already checked not to display. (As warningsappear, you can select a check box to prevent the warning from appearingagain.)

Document preview

1. Go to Edit > Preferences > File Handling(Windows) or InDesign > Preferences > File Handling (macOS).

2. Check Always Save Preview Images with Documents.

   See Also

   Manage graphics links5 Secret Tips To Repair Corrupt InDesign (.indd) File on MacWhich File Format? How to Open InDesign Files in CS4, CS5, CS6 and CCHelp Center

3. Select the preview settings from the following options:

   • Pages: Select the pages you want to save as previews from First Page, First 2 Pages, First 5 Pages, First 10 Pages, or All Pages. The default option is First 2 pages.
   • Preview Size: Select the preview size of your document from Small 128x128, Medium 256x256, Large 512x512, or Extra Large 1024x1024. The default option is Large 512x512.

4. Select OK.

Customize user interface scaling

Configure scaling preferences in InDesign to uniformly scale the user interface based on your screen resolution. Elements of the user interface are scaled accordingly, making for comfortable viewing on high-resolution monitors.When you launch InDesign with fresh preference settings, it identifies your screen resolution and adjusts the application’s UI scaling accordingly.

Note: UI scaling is not supported on screens with low resolution.

To set the user interface scaling:

• (Win) SelectEdit> Preferences> User Interface Scaling
• (macOS) SelectInDesign> Preferences>User Interface Scaling
  

In theUser Interface Scaling dialog, use the following options to customize the Interface:

• UI:Adjust the UI sizing slider to increase or decrease the scaling of the UI based on your requirement. In general, high-resolution monitors need a higher scaling factor. A preview of the scaled UI is displayed next to the slider.Restart InDesign to apply the updated settings. If you choose to restart later, changes will take effect the next time you launch InDesign.
  The number of stops displayed in the slider depends on the resolution of your screen. More stops are displayed for screens with higher resolutions.
  
• Cursor: When enabled (ON by default), this option scales the cursor icons in proportion to the UI.
• Anchor Points, Handle, and Bounding Box Display Size:Adjust the slider to scale the display size of anchor points, direction handles, and bounding box.

If you change settings when no documentsare open, your changes set the defaults for new documents. If adocument is open when you change settings, the changes affect onlythat document.

Similarly, if you change settings when no objectsare selected, your changes set the defaults for new objects.

1. Close all documents.

2. Change any menu items or panel or dialog boxsettings.

Note:

If you use the same page size and language for most documents, you can change these defaults with no document open. For example, to change the default page size, close all documents, choose File>Document Setup, and select the desired page size. To set a default dictionary, close all documents, choose Edit> Preferences> Dictionary (Windows) or InDesign> Preferences> Dictionary (macOS), and select an option from the Language menu.

1. With the document open, choose Edit>Deselect All.

2. Change any menu items or panel or dialog box settings.

   See Also

   How to Fix Too Many Background Processes Running on a Windows PC

When InDesign is behaving erratically, deleting preferences (also referred to as “trashing preferences” or “removing preferences”) often solves the problem.

It’s a good idea to make a backup copy of the preference files called InDesign Defaults and InDesign SavedData. Instead of removing your preferences, you can copy these backup files over the problematic corrupt preference files and not lose any customizations.

• Windows: Start InDesign, and then press Shift+Ctrl+Alt. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete preference files.

• macOS:While pressing Shift+Option+Command+Control, start InDesign. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete preference files.

Reset user preferences

Note:

Replace [#] with the product version as 15.0 or 14.0. Replace [language] with your choice of locale like en_US or jp_JP.

Note:

Re-creating the InDesign preference files restores settings to their defaults, so you lose custom settings associated with the old preference files.

In general, change the feature settings in the dialog box, and then save the settings. Styles and presets are stored in the document in which they are created. You can use the settings from another document by importing or loading the styles and presets from that document. In addition, most presets can be exported or saved to a separate file and distributed to other computers.

You can also share styles and presets across all documents in a book file. For more information, see Synchronize book documents.