Reset Preferences

InDesign crash­ing? Menus and palettes blank or out of sorts? Other strange flut­ter­ings from the but­ter­fly? You might have cor­rupt­ed pref­er­ences. Reset them.

Just press CMD+OPT+SHIFT (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT) while launch­ing InDesign (or Photoshop, Illustrator, ImageReady, GoLive, or InCopy). Adobe says that’s easy. Trust me, it’s eas­i­er to say than do.

The prob­lem is, with a decent com­put­er, you don’t have long to get those three keys depressed before the appli­ca­tion pass­es the point in its launch cycle when they no longer have an effect. On slow­er computers–a G3 or low-RAM G4, for example–you’ll have time to double-click the appli­ca­tion icon, retie your shoes, and still get CMD+OPT+SHIFT depressed in time to make InDesign trash and rebuild its pref­er­ences. Ironic, real­ly, that Adobe, the com­pa­ny whose Photoshop was the dri­ving fac­tor in most design­ers RAM and com­put­er upgrades, is actu­al­ly bank­ing on slow­er com­put­ers to make a fea­ture work.

The key­board short­cut to reset pref­er­ences is a tip, but to make it work on a fast sys­tem, either prac­tice a new three-fingered salute, or fol­low this tip: Make a copy of the alias or short­cut and put it on the desk­top, and then launch InDesign from there. Launching from the dock or start menu and then try­ing to time the press of the keys is chal­leng­ing, but double-click-launching from the desk­top gen­er­al­ly proves eas­i­er for those with­out super­hu­man speed.