Adobe InDesign 21.6.0

Anyone who has laid out a long magazine knows the feeling of hunting for a command buried somewhere in a menu. The 21.5.1 update makes that a little easier: there is now a search bar inside the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box, so you can find a command without memorising which menu category Adobe buried it in.

What is actually new in the interface?

Beyond the shortcut search, the HTML Preview feature no longer demands a separate plug-in. You get a live preview straight from the file menu, which feels about a decade overdue but is welcome nonetheless. The home screen now lets you add local files as cloud documents directly, and you can download cloud documents for offline work without digging through a web browser.

Did they touch the export engine?

They did, and it is a quiet but meaningful change for anyone producing accessible documents. Table accessibility has been improved for both PDF and EPUB exports, so screen readers should parse those financial reports and catalogues more intelligently. Data Merge also gained support for multiline records and UTF-8 encoded data files, which finally stops accented characters from turning into gibberish mid-mail-merge.

What about image handling?

You can now bulk-generate or remove AI-generated Alt Text across multiple images, which is a sensible time-saver if you are preparing a long document for accessibility compliance and do not fancy tagging two hundred photographs one by one.

Place a single text frame before attempting anything ambitious

Open a blank document, set the margins to something sensible and place a single text frame before you do anything ambitious. It sounds obvious, but the instinct to rebuild the New Yorker on day one is strong. Resist it. Setting up a proper baseline grid now — under Preferences > Grids — will save you from rivers of misaligned text later. While you are there, switch on Smart Text Reflow so added pages appear automatically when text overflows; nobody needs a plus sign in a red circle on a Friday afternoon.

The other thing worth doing early is making friends with Object Styles. If you come from a word processor background, you will naturally reach for Paragraph and Character styles, and that is good. But object-level formatting — stroke weight, corner radius, text wrap offset — deserves its own reusable blueprint too. Spend twenty minutes building styles for your three most common frame types, and you will not have to explain to a printer why half the image boxes have a one-pixel black outline.

Save and load custom shortcut sets via the new search bar

Several genuinely useful touches sit just off the main path. The new keyboard shortcut search in the Shortcuts dialog is the headline, but it pairs beautifully with an older feature many people miss: you can save and load custom shortcut sets, so if you move between a MacBook and a studio machine, your muscle memory does not have to relearn itself. Export your set from one machine, import it on the other, done.

A less obvious but equally handy trick: holding Command while clicking on a frame handle lets you resize both the frame and its content together, rather than resizing the container and then separately scaling the image inside. Combining that with Auto-Fit (right-click the frame, look under Fitting) means you can drag a picture frame to a new size and watch the image re-proportion itself without a second step. It is the sort of thing that saves maybe four seconds per adjustment — and over a hundred-page document, that adds up.

Another quiet gem, especially since the 21.5.1 Data Merge improvements, is the ability to preview merged records directly in the document before exporting. With multiline records now supported, you can check that a three-line address block does not break awkwardly across a text frame, all without generating a single PDF. UTF-8 support also means Catalan, Czech and Polish data files finally behave themselves, eliminating the random accented-character scramble that used to plague merges.

Missing fonts often mean a different version of the same typeface

One recurring headache is missing font warnings on a document you know perfectly well uses fonts you have installed. This usually happens because the document was last saved on a system with a different version of the same typeface — perhaps a PostScript flavour rather than OpenType. The fix is rarely reinstalling the font; instead, use Type > Find Font and replace each problematic font with the exact same family name. InDesign then re-maps the references internally and the warning vanishes.

Another classic is the sluggish display when working on a layout heavy with linked images. The immediate culprit is usually Display Performance, which defaults to High Quality. Switch it to Typical Display via the View menu and the screen redraws much faster. If things still crawl, check that your linked images are not enormous multi-megabyte TIFF files placed in tiny frames; InDesign is still having to read and scale them in the background. A quick batch-resize in Photoshop or even a converted JPEG placeholder can make the working file much lighter.

Then there is the vanishing cursor problem. You click inside a text frame, the insertion point appears, and then it disappears the moment you type. Nine times out of ten a hidden character is at play — usually a page break or a column break inserted right at the cursor position. Toggle Type > Show Hidden Characters to see what is lurking, delete the offending break, and your text input returns to normal.

Build a master page instead of drawing text frames by hand

Drawing text frames by hand for every single page is the first trap. The proper workflow is to build a Master Page with threaded text frames, page numbers and any running headers, then apply that master to your document pages. If you later need to nudge the header up by two millimetres, you change it once on the master and every page follows suit. Doing it the manual way means you will be nudging two hundred headers individually, which is nobody's idea of a good evening.

Another early mistake involves image resolution. Dragging a JPEG straight from a web browser or a screenshot folder places a 72 ppi image into a document destined for 300 dpi print output. The placed image looks fine on screen — screens show pixels, after all — but the printed result will be soft and disappointing. The Links panel shows Effective PPI for every image; check it early and often. Anything below 240 ppi for print is a conversation you want to have before, not after, the press run.

Beginners also tend to ignore preflight. The little green or red dot at the bottom of the document window is not decoration; it is a live error checker that can catch overset text, missing fonts and RGB images bound for a CMYK press run before you export. Define a preflight profile under Window > Output > Preflight that matches your intended output — print, digital or both — and glance at that dot before every export. It catches things a visual check on screen simply cannot.

Finally, a subtle but common error is not assigning a colour profile at document setup. InDesign defaults to a generic working space, but if you know the job is heading to a specific press or online-only distribution, setting the right RGB or CMYK profile from the start avoids the washed-out colours that come from a late-stage profile conversion.

Living with the latest changes day to day

The removal of the separate HTML Preview plugin means checking how a layout translates to the web is now a single menu command rather than a hunt for a plug-in you may or may not have installed. For teams producing EPUB and web versions alongside print, this shortens the feedback loop noticeably; you can spot a misaligned element in the HTML preview, tweak it, and re-export without leaving InDesign.

The new cloud document workflow from the home screen — adding local files as cloud documents and downloading them back — feels modest on paper but genuinely changes how you move between machines. Starting a layout on an office iMac and picking it up later on a MacBook at home no longer requires a trip through a web browser or a manually copied folder. It is simply a row of thumbnails on the home screen.

And for anyone who deals with long, image-heavy documents, the bulk Alt Text tools deserve a permanent spot in your accessibility routine. Generating descriptive text for a single image is easy; doing it for a hundred is a tedious chore that gets skipped. Selecting all images, generating Alt Text in one pass and then removing the one or two the AI got wrong is far more likely to actually happen before an export deadline.

Adobe InDesign 21.6.0 delivers the latest round of refinements and bug fixes for smoother, more dependable page layout.

• macOS 13 (Ventura) or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit processor