Aug. 6, 2008
Resetting your preferences can eliminate the little demons…
It’s surprising when talking with people, to find that many don’t know they can reset their InDesign preferences back to the default out of the box configuration. One person told me they had printed out screen grabs of each individual tab in the preferences dialogue, and when they wanted to revert back to InDesign’s defaults they used their printout as a reference.
There is a way to revert to the default out of the box preferences in InDesign, but before I show you how to do that, let’s talk about why you might want to do this. One reason would be to eliminate any of the weird and quirky things that sometimes happen in the InDesign environment. For instance, I have had a document that for some reason or another the links panel wouldn’t display the links that were obviously on the page. My options at that stage were either exporting the doc as an InDesign Interchange (.inx) file or resetting the preferences back to their default out of the box configuration. I decided to try resetting the preferences first because I noticed some weirdness on another doc I was working on the day before. I went with the hunch and bingo!
Resetting these preferences can sometimes go a long way to eliminating all sorts of technical quirks, so the next time InDesign goes AWOL give it a go, you may be surprised. Oh, make sure you know what your old preferences were so you can go through and set them up just the way you like. Enough of all that, lets look at how to reset them.
Well first of all make sure you have quit InDesign. Mac Users, while pressing Shift+Option+Command+Control, start InDesign. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete preference files, this dialogue will appear twice. Once you choose Yes to both dialogues you can release your fingers from the keyboard. Windows users, start InDesign, and then press Shift+Ctrl+Alt. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete preference files, this dialogue will appear twice, once you choose Yes to both dialogues you can release your fingers from the keyboard.
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