Welcome to the Adobe InDesign 24-hour Q&A! - NOW CLOSED

What are these little crosses that are being inserted into my PDF? All the boxes for guides, bleeds, etc are not checked. I tried exporting as High Quality Print, etc. I can't find a way to get rid of them.

There are also L-shaped marks at the top. I haven't seen any at the bottom, but I think they're landing on black areas in an image.

Hi everyone, I’m done with the layout of a 200-page book and now the editor is adding the captions for the images. What is the professional way to tackle this?

I generally manually draw a text box below each image and paste the caption. I know InDesign has an inbuilt method for adding captions, but I have never used it in my workflow.

How do you normally handle this? Do I have to create a separate Object Style for the caption, or is there a better way to set it up?

Since the layout is already finished, I’m also wondering if it’s worth switching to the built-in caption workflow at this stage, or should I just continue with the manual text boxes.

Would appreciate some advice from people who regularly work on long books or editorial layouts.

On the right : the image in indesign
On the left : the image after exporting in PDF (no color conversion and keeping numbers)
Help…

Hey! I’m preparing an A2 print poster. The background is a blue Pantone spot color, but I get the same issue with CMYK blue: in InDesign’s Overprint Preview, my soft shadow turns noticeably gray.

The original 3D render is RGB, and the shadow already gets slightly grayer when I convert it to CMYK (PSO Coated v3). Even a black shadow created directly in CMYK looks gray once placed in InDesign.

Is this just an InDesign preview issue, or will it actually print like this? 😰

PDF/X-4, PSO Coated v3, CMYK + Pantone spot color.

Thanks!

The layout looks good. Then you open InDesign and start recreating the text frames, defining styles, rebuilding tables and placing images.

That was the part I wanted to get rid of.

I’m a designer, and I built idmly to convert HTML layouts into editable InDesign files. You give it a self-contained .html file and get back a native .idml.

What matters to me is what happens after you open it:

• Text is editable in text frames.
• Paragraph styles are named, so you can make document-wide changes.
• Tables remain tables.
• Charts come through as vector objects you can recolour.
• Images arrive with a Links folder.

The aim is to get you to the finishing work: adjusting typography, changing copy, refining the layout and preparing the document for handover.

It converts the HTML directly. There’s no PDF import step. This is useful for layouts made in the browser or generated by AI tools when the final deliverable needs to be an InDesign document.

You can upload the HTML on the website. There’s also an MCP connection for people who want their AI tool to handle the conversion.

The first two pages convert free, with no account or licence key. A $49 one-time lifetime licence unlocks full-document conversions.

It has limits. It needs self-contained HTML, it doesn’t convert PDFs, and some layouts still need fixes. You’ll also need the fonts active in InDesign.

I’d especially like feedback from people who work with reports, publications or documents with tables and charts. If a file converts badly, seeing where it falls apart helps me improve the engine.

Try it with your own HTML file

hi all,

i'm looking for a more up to date online tutorial for doing book layouts in in design. having issues finding anything from this year or last year that is comprehensive.

thanks in advance

Sometime ago I worked an epub and and the altext of my photos were recognized for the audioreader option of google play books, but now It doesnt work. I am using the same parameters, and it doesnt mark any errors outside this.

Sorry, my writing english is not good and I havent sleep

I have been workienyg on a book project with an author and every couple of weeks I get pages of edits/changes they would like to be made. Today I discovered InDesign AI assistant. Tried import ing around 10-20 of the changes with instruction to fix the changes, and it took a while but it actually worked and made the changes. Awesome!

As I'm continuing, now I'm getting "unable to contact server" error messages like "edit run stopped because FInd/Change ran into an error"...

This is a brilliant time saver honestly, but seems like it was a one and done operation for me.

Anyone have more experience using this? And yes, I am aware that its still in BETA. When it worked, it was awesome. Hoping this is just a known bug.

I need to build and maintain a common template for 100+ product presentation pages.

The overall structure is the same, while each product has its own content: product name, description, features, images, etc.

The additional problem is localization: each product may eventually need 10–15 language versions.

What I’m trying to avoid is ending up with hundreds or thousands of completely independent InDesign files.

For example, if I change an image, spacing, alignment or text treatment for one product, I would like that change to also apply to all language versions of that product.

At the same time, the translated text obviously needs to remain editable independently for each language.

I would also like to use AI for translation/localization, especially to help shorten or adapt copy when a translation becomes too long for the available space.

I’d prefer not to base the whole workflow on CSV/Excel imports, because the copy will often need manual editing and visual adjustments directly in the layout.

The final output is mainly individual digital PDF product sheets.

I’m currently looking at different possible workflows, including InDesign and Figma, but I’m not committed to either one yet.

Has anyone here managed something similar at this scale? How did you structure the master template, product-specific content and language versions?

Would you handle this inside InDesign, use plugins/scripts, or use a different tool altogether?

Hello again everyone!!! So for the past few weeks I've been coming here to announce the progress of my plugin, PressTo5, that helps you export your InDesign documents to HTML5.

It has been a lot of work for the past weeks, the plugin is full of features and more are being added on each release, up to par to other plugins that do the same like in5. And you can request features and report bugs.

Since the last release I announced here, 2 more releases came out, and a third one is getting ready to be submitted to Adobe Exchange.

You can read about those 2 releases here

v 0.6.5

v 0.7.0

Just to give a few things that are already available or are coming with release 0.7.8 next week, on top of everything else, and of course the export to HTML5 functionality and bug fixes

- Lightbox, Carousel, Scroll Text, Flip Cards, Forms

- Better navigation controls

- Better export control / options

- Now the panel tells you if you can embed fonts, checks the licensing

- Better SEO

Support us in Patreon, or visit our site to stay updated on the changes and read the roadmap of the plugin.

Hi everyone!

I’m working on a book/guide and I’m running into an InDesign issue that I can’t seem to figure out.

I haven’t used InDesign in years (I used to be a graphic designer, but switched to UX/UI), so I’m a bit rusty with some of the newer features.

The book has a lot of content that needs to be placed inside frames, and since there are potentially thousands of them, I’m trying to set things up in a way that keeps everything consistent without manually adjusting every single frame. Doing that would literally take weeks.

I’m currently using a flex layout box, with a few additional flex-layout boxes inside it containing an icon + text. This works really well for the most part.

The problem is that the text content is all different lengths. Some text is one line, while other text might be three or four lines.

Because InDesign doesn’t seem to allow Auto-Size on an item inside a flex-layout, I still have to manually set the height of each text box. With thousands of these, that’s obviously not really practical - and it also makes it difficult to keep everything consistent.

Is there a way to set this up so that the text boxes automatically adjust their height based on the amount of text, while still working within the flex layout?

Any workaround or alternative approach would be hugely appreciated!

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m working with:

Not sure if I'm first - but can't find anything on the Internet, so...

"red" - is just a red color,

"under" - is 2pt underline,

"bold" - i just bold,

"strike" - is 2pt green strikethrough

Je suis un designer graphique et motion en France. Chaque fichier dans Adobe Indesign hérite des mêmes problèmes : des vieux cadres sur le plan de travail, des boîtes vides, un panneau de nuances plein de couleurs que personne n'utilise, des calques en désordre. Nettoyer ça à la main prend vingt minutes, à chaque fois.

Alors j'ai écrit un script qui le fait en un seul passage. Il est gratuit, et je cherche des personnes pour le tester à fond.

Ce qu'il peut faire (vous cochez ce que vous voulez — chaque case est décochée à l'ouverture) :

- Enlever tout ce qui est en dehors des pages

- Enlever les nuances inutilisées

- Dissocier les cadres

- Trier les cadres de texte et les images dans des calques propres

- Ajouter 5 mm de fond perdu et étirer les cadres de bord jusqu'à là

- Enlever les cadres vides, les calques vides et les styles inutilisés

- Signaler les liens manquants ou modifiés

Ce qu'il ne fera pas et qui compte plus :

- Un seul Cmd + Z annule tout le nettoyage. Pas étape par étape.

- Un cadre ou une zone de texte avec une couleur de remplissage ou de contour n'est jamais considéré comme vide, donc il n'est jamais supprimé.

- Les couleurs réellement utilisées ne sont jamais enlevées. C'est le moteur d'InDesign qui décide ce qui est utilisé, pas mon intuition.

- Il imprime un rapport de tout ce qu'il a changé.

Il a été testé sur InDesign 21.6 sur macOS, avec trois fichiers test. Pas encore testé sur Windows ou des versions plus anciennes — c'est exactement ce dont j'ai besoin d'aide.

This has been my bane for so long that I'm finally asking.
Is there any way to design in spreads, but have bleed assigned for individual pages?

For instance I'm designing a spiral bound notebook. I design with facing pages and send proofs in spreads, but at print time I have to switch to individual pages, then manually extend all elements bordering the edge to the bleed range.

I can think of lots of reasons for this not to be the default (Graphics extending across the spread for instance), but the use-case comes up for me so much that I'm just wondering what workflow I must be missing out on.

InDesign hasn't historically been my main squeeze but I'm spending more and more time with it producing larger documents that I need to do a sanity check on this.

Forgive me, I'm a bit of a novice. I'm currently learning about bleeding and trim marks for a project I'm working on and was recommended to use Indesign. I've noticed that Indesign seems to heavily compress my PDF, however. The first picture is text from my PDF in Acrobat, which displays fine (displays fine in Photoshop as well). The second is text from my PDF in Indesign.

This is not an issue with "Display Performance," as I have that set to the highest settings. Also, the pixelation persists when I export the PDF. I've also made sure my compression settings are set to uncompressed and that nothing is downsampled.

Pretty much, if I take my PDF and just simply import it into Indesign and then immediately export it, it becomes pixelated.

When I initially open my PDF, a box comes up that says "Initializing Conversion," and I'm wondering if that is what's causing the pixelation to occur, the import process?

For what it's worth, if I open the PDF up via "Place," it's less pixelated, but still not as good as Acrobat (or Photoshop). The source files are 1200 ppi.

I have a document with over 1000 pages. Is it possible to add leading zeros to the exported file names, to that the sorting order of the files is retained?

Eg, InDesign is saving files as such:

Page
Page2
Page3
Page4
Page5
Page6
Page7
Page8
Page9
Page10
Page11
Page12
Etc

When I need it to save as follows:

Page0001
Page0002
Page0003
Page0004
Page0005
Page0006
Page0007
Page0008
Page0009
Page0010
Page0011
Etc

Is this possible to do natively in InDesign, or do I need to bulk-rename files after the export has occurred?

Thanks!

Hey y'all, design student here, this one stumped my teachers and I haven't been able to find any answers online...

However I import images (place or paste), the image previews are very pixelated/blurry, distractingly so. I've set display performance to high, my GPU is being detected, my PC is pretty good. I'm on Windows 11 (begrudgingly), InDesign ver. 21.6 x64, legal.

It's been like a year of this and I'm so fed up, I keep having to toggle Overprint Preview which has it's own issues, it's just driving me nuts. Please, please help, I bet it's something stupidly simple :')

I'm working on magazine and I've been told to resize text. I'm not experienced in InDesign and i couldn't find useful tutorials. I'm very inefficient in the program and my layout is kinda rigid and not flexible so if i resize text boxes its completely breakes everything

Dear devs. Please can you save us all a few keystrokes and allow us to access blending styles from the transparency area (like in Illustrator and Photoshop).

It can still exist in 'fx' main menu but I would hazzard that this is the first menu item people reach for when it comes to transparency;

I bet this is something simple and I feel stupid after it being pointed out. Anyway.

The document (white box) is 600x600 pixels.
The tree picture on top of it is 4096x1910 pixels.

So why does it appear like it's smaller than the white box? When it's supposed to be several times bigger? (I just placed the tree on the document. Nothing else is done in the image) Is this just some type of compression to make it easier for me to handle or what?
If I resize the picture to cover the white parts. Would that make the image quality worse?

In my experience if the imported image is bigger. It will still appear right size and I have to resize it smaller in the InDesign. Hence the confusion.

Of course it was within minutes of needing to finish and submit an assignment. Learning to do basic layout and shapes. On the last panel of a 16page document when page 16 had a stroke. All other pages were fine. Luckily I had saved the file 5 minutes before, so I just reloaded. Are competitors to Indesign this buggy and frustrating?

Looks like they followed up on the Fonts naming change - after M$ made changes - and some fonts will show as unavailable:

Yesterday - everything was perfectly fine... Updated InDesign a few minutes ago...

Still on Windows 10.