Preferences include settings such as panel positions, measurement options, and display options for graphics and typography. Preference settings specify how InDesign documents and objects behave initially.

Numerous program preferences and default settings are stored in the Adobe InDesign preferences files. These files, including the InDesign Defaults file, are saved each time you exit from InDesign. The settings files are located here:

Windows XP

Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\[Version]\[language]

Windows Vista

Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\[version]\[language]

Mac OS

[username]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/InDesign/[version]/[language]

1. Choose Edit > Preferences > General (Windows) or InDesign > Preferences > General (Mac OS), and then choose the type of preferences you want to specify.
2. In the Page Numbering section, choose a page numbering method from the View menu. (See Display absolute or section numbering in the Pages panel.)
3. In the Font Downloading and Embedding section, specify a threshold to trigger font subsetting based on the number of glyphs a font contains. This setting affects font downloading options in the Print and Export dialog boxes.
4. In the When Scaling section, you can determine how scaled objects are reflected in panels and how the content of scaled frames behaves.

   • 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. In the Scripting section, select Enable Attached Scripts to allow JavaScript actions to be attached to features in InDesign. You may want to turn off this option if you’re opening an InDesign document from an unknown source.
6. Click Reset All Warning Dialogs to display all warnings, even the ones you’ve already checked not to display. (As warnings appear, you can select a check box to prevent the warning from appearing again.)

You can store settings for reuse, including settings for the following items:

• Creating paragraph and character styles. (See Add paragraph and character styles.)

• Creating object styles. (See Object styles.)

• Creating table and cell styles. (See Table and cell styles.)

• Creating PDF export presets. (See Customize Adobe PDF presets.)

• Creating print presets. All the attributes in the Print dialog box are included in the style. (See Print a document or book.)

• Creating trap presets. (See Trapping color.)

• Creating transparency flattener presets. (See Flattening transparent artwork.)

• Creating table of contents styles. (See Create or import TOC styles.)

• Saving the workspace configuration.

• Creating document presets. (See Define document presets.)

• Creating stroke styles. (See Define custom stroke styles.)

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.