Mini Bridge and InDesign CS5

Category: InDesign Tutorials 303 0

In recent InDesign tutorials, you’ve learned how to do many things. You’ve learned to place files, work with frames, and create all kinds of wonderful layouts, as well as a great deal more. InDesign tutorials can show you a whole lot about working with the program and teach you all its aspects.

One part of InDesign that hasn’t been covered yet is the Mini Bridge palette. You may have noticed it during your times of practice or work, and it might be a bit mysterious to you. Mini Bridge isn’t mysterious at all once you figure it out, and it can actually be a great aid to your work when you need it. This InDesign tutorial will go into all the ins and outs of the Mini Bridge feature of InDesign.

Quick Guide to Mini Bridge

The Mini Bridge palette looks like this:

You’ll notice that it’s basically a way to navigate through the files on your computer, with a big focus on the relevant files for your InDesign files. With the Mini Bridge palette you can accomplish many things, and you’ll learn all about them.

1. One of the most useful things about Mini Bridge is that it allows you to locate files within your document even if they are scattered throughout your hard drive. If you need to access one of the pictures linked in your layout, Mini Bridge will let you do that simply by right clicking the little link icon (in the top right of the display box) then selecting Show Linked Files.

2. Mini Bridge will also let you rename any file in your InDesign layout, even if you are working on it at the moment.

3. If you want to make an InDesign snippet, all you have to do is drag the object into the Mini Bridge palette (rather than saving it as a file separately)

4. Placing files is also much easier, simply a matter of drag and drop from the palette into the layout. Instead of having to use the Place dialog, you can simply find the image in the panel and drag it in.

The Benefits of Mini Bridge

Mini Bridge makes designing much faster and simpler. You can accomplish all the tasks that Mini Bridge does without actually having to use the panel, but it makes it much easier to work with the palette. You save time switching windows, navigating around your computer, or trying to locate files, and just let the program do it for you. Not only that, but you get the benefit of bigger and better thumbnails, making choosing and locating images less of a hassle.

Not only that, but Mini Bridge can be found in many other Adobe Creative Suite programs. Photoshop, Flash, and Illustrator all feature a Mini Bridge palette, though each is adapted to the particular program’s needs. The benefit of this is that what you learned in this InDesign tutorial can be useful for your other work as well, and make navigation, design, animation, and illustration twice as quick and simple.

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