presentation mode in indesign

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Using Presentation Mode in InDesign

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You probably know about Preview mode in InDesign: Press W and suddenly the pasteboard goes neutral gray and all non-printing objects (guides, stuff hanging off the edge of the page) disappear. You can also get to Preview mode from the View > Screen Mode menu. But there’s another feature lurking in that menu, too: Presentation mode.

I love Presentation mode because it takes over your entire screen. It’s like Preview on steroids. The menus go away, the panels go away, all other programs disappear, everything of non-importance goes away, and you’re left with your page on a black background. It’s a terrific way to show a document to your boss or a client.

To jump into Presentation mode, you can also press Shift+W (obviously not when your cursor is in a text frame). To exit Presentation mode, you press the same shortcut or press the Esc key.

Here are a few other Presentation mode secrets you should know:

• When you’re in Presentation mode, you can press W to change the background to white, or G to set it to gray. Press B to set it back to Black.
• If you have more than one monitor, the document goes into Presentation mode on whatever monitor the document is currently on. (That might be different from where your InDesign menus and panels are.)
• You cannot work on your document in Presentation mode, but you can navigate through the document one spread at a time by pressing the arrow keys on your keyboard. Also, clicking with the mouse moves forward one spread, and Shift-clicking moves back.
• Even though InDesign calls this “Presentation mode”, unfortunately none of the interactive features work in this mode: no buttons, movies, animations, or anything like that. Too bad!
• You can find this shortcut by choosing Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts , choosing the Product Area called View Menu, and scrolling down the list until you find Screen Mode: Presentation.
• If you want the same shortcut to both enter and exit Presentation mode (as a toggle), you need to make two shortcuts for the same feature. First, set the Context (found at the bottom of the menu) to Default and assign your shortcut to this feature. Then, set the Context to Presentation mode and assign the same shortcut. Otherwise, you will be able to enter Presentation Mode, but you won’t be able to exit it again with that shortcut.

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Small thing : the presentation mode is not really full screen, it has (at least on my computers) a small 10px black border around, which makes screen sized pixel documents slightly of pixel perfection when displayed.

I like Presentation Mode in InDesign

I love reviewing my artwork in presentation mode — especially high res brochures when I’m working in a screen mode where my graphics are less than “high quality.” Best of both worlds!

You can work while in Presentation view if you have two monitors:

Window > Arrange > New view Drag new view to 2nd monitor Shift-W

Go back to your first view and continue editing – changes are mirrored in real time on the 2nd monitor…

Increible!!!!

Do you know how to keep the Apple menu bar visible on the 1st monitor not the 2nd?

You have to uncheck “displays have separate spaces” within Mission Control / System Prefs…note, this does change/prevents all apps from using Mac fullscreen features in the same way (or at all). Also, the Split Screen /Multi Tasking feature in El Capitan doesn’t work.

i’d like to be able to view pages in presentation mode instead of spreads…any suggestions?

Under document setup if you uncheck the “facing pages” option it will make your document into singular pages instead of spreads.

Just got stuck in presentation mode and had to force quit to get out (shift-w did not work). Looks like another useless Adobe feature to me (especially when preview does the same thing and allows you to get out without force quitting). A quick google search indicates that I’m not the only one to get stuck in presentation mode. Looks to me like another “cool” feature with no real practical functionality.

@Jeff: That’s weird. The Esc key didn’t work either? I’ve never heard of someone getting stuck in Presentation mode. Personally, I find it really useful sometimes, though I use it less frequently than Preview mode.

I, too am stuck in Presentation mode. (CS6, Mac 10.8.4) I remember trying this once before and getting stuck but somehow found a way out. Today nothing works. From the F3 button I accessed Firefox to look for an answer but am not finding it. OK, off to Force Quit and recapture lost work. Any suggestions would be helpful for next time I forget not to try this!

Never happened to me either. strange. You might want to rebuild your preferences, perhaps InDesign has something stuck in its windpipe.

OK, thanks Anne-Marie. Luckily, Cmd-Q worked so I was able to save all open docs before ID closed. On reopening, I looked at keyboard shortcuts and remembered that I am still hanging on to the old Quark 4.0 set. Maybe that’s what is stuck in the windpipe? ;-) I’ll consider a preferences rebuild, but oh so much to re-establish there . . .

Totally got stuck. Again. Did it last year and promised never to. Rubbish

Excellent Share! Be Blessed.

I do love Presentation mode. It’s great when I show an artwork to my boss. However, Presentation mode is not displaying very clear (pixelated), any help?

Is it possible to hide the black line on the page boundaries when you are in White background?

I had the same issue. Just wouldn’t work no matter what i did. Copied all of the content into a new document, entering and exiting preview mode worked fine with W again.

Just had to force quit. Warning! May have a glitch.

Presentation Mode is great. To improve it however, I hope that Adobe:

1. Makes it Pixel Perfect in size.

2. On dual monitor systems, it should (or by option should) hide/black out the second monitor. I find the second monitor with all the pallets on it distracting, especially since they are entirely unusable in Presentation mode.

Stuck… on PC, tried everything!

When I pressed shift W to exit presentation mode, my cursor was no longer visible except outside of the area of my InDesign document. I clicked cmd w to close the file but it wanted me to save. I couldn’t get the cursor to click on ‘not save’. (I’m in Windows here at this work place. Sigh.)

PJ: That sounds frustrating. I find that sometimes switching from InDesign to another application and then back again clears up cursor problems. Also, you can use keyboard shortcuts for pressing buttons in dialog boxes. On the Mac, Cmd-D clicks “Don’t Save.” I don’t recall what it is on Windows, but if you hold down the Alt key, you might see a letter underlined; that’s a clue to which key to press to “click” that button.

Thanks. So many keyboard short cuts I don’t know about!

I have a question, actually. I am new to Adobe CC. I’ve noticed that when I am in preview mode and then toggle to normal view (W) that I will get different images on my newspaper layout, as in changes that I made, pictures that I placed, etc. will revert back to previous versions and then go back to what I placed last when I toggle back to preview mode. When I print it will print the latest version even though I’m seeing a different version, but why am I seeing different versions between those 2 views and how can I be certain that I’m changing the correct information? Is there a way to turn that off, whatever it is? I’ve been toggling between the two views with “W” for years, so what changed in CC and how do I turn it off? Does that make sense? I can send screen shots if you need them. I am on an iMac. Thank you!

Darcy: Wow, that is really strange. I’ve not seen it do that before. Consider rebuilding your preferences (if you don’t know how to do that, click Resources in the nav bar at the top of the page and click the InDesign FAQ)

Presentation mode is awesome. However exiting it; it goes to the center of the screen. Is there any way to exit presentation mode and stay in the same area and zoom you were just in?

I work sometimes at 500% working on small details. Every so often I enter presentation mode and would like when I exit to stay in the zoomed in section I was just at?

I’m using the presentation mode for InDesign already a couple of years, but suddenly it seems the presentation mode isn’t full screen. My windows task bar stays visible and hides a portion of my file. It’s really annoying, can I put this off?

And if you’re wondering how to change the background color for standard Preview mode (can be confusing when you inherit a document from someone else), here’s the tip:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/968869

Where is this context menu you speak of? I can’t assign a toggle to my normal/preview mode. Can’t begin to imagine why the shortcut vanished …

Rich: The context menu is when you right-click (or Ctrl-click on a Mac with a one-button mouse).

Oh, okay … I always just called it the “right-click menu.” Now I know :)

Can you zoom in and out on certain elements of a page while in Presentation Mode. Normally I would do this with CMD+Spacebar+CLICK.

This is now advancing to the next page/slide?!?! Can’t find the keyboard shortcut to change this.

Kevin: Nope, Presentation mode is just full screen, for display. You cannot zoom in/out.

If you have trackpad on Mac you can. Pinch with two fingers.

Oh yes you can! While defining your hotkey, make sure context is set as “Presentation Mode”.

Presentation mode is flickering and inconsistently getting stuck in Adobe InDesign CC 2017.0 (12.0.0.81 build) release on the New MacBook Pro (2016 | Touch Bar, macOS Sierra 10.12.3 (16D32). Really annoying and make presentation unreliable and useless :(

same here. Did you find a solution ?

W, G and B commands no longer seem to work in Presentation Mode for changing the background colour of a document. Does anyone know of a fix?

So sad when I found out that the shortcut wasn’t working anymore!

Does anyone know if you can switch between documents (not pages) whilst in Presentation Mode?

Does anyone know why there isn’t this feature anymore in InDesign CC 2017?

I have the latest version (CC2017) and the feature still works, the only option mentioned that no longer works for me is the W G B to change the color of the back. Try going via the menus to activate it (View -> Screen Mode -> Presentation) Otherwise maybe resetting your preferences will do the trick

Is there a possibility to play the all spreads automatically when I am in presentation mode. So it behaves like a Slideshow. Infinite loop of course. Thanks for your answers. So that I not have to make a pdf.

This has been an issue with every version of InDesign that I have ever used. The Esc key simply does not work when in Presentation mode. Simple answer is Do Not Use it! In Windows closing InDesign with Alt-F4 allows you to quit the app. It’s really annoying and has never been addressed by Adobe – bad form!

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Create Awesome Slides from InDesign using in5’s Presentation Mode

Adobe InDesign has long had methods for publishing presentations—directly from InDesign using the  Presentation Mode or via PDF using  Full Screen Mode —but these methods never reached the level of sophistication and control found in Powerpoint and Keynote presentations.

That’s because those methods didn’t support many of InDesign’s powerful interactive features like Animation and Multi-State Objects. They simply produced static slideshows with no controllable transitions between slides.

In the past, I’ve modified my in5 output from InDesign so that I could present slides using HTML and include interactivity in my presentations.

When I noticed that my favorite conference— Creative Pro Week —now includes an entire day on presentations (dubbed the  Click conference) it got my wheels turning about adding explicit presentation capabilities to in5.

Presentation expert, Mark Heaps , is heading up that section of the conference and also presenting an InDesign session on presentations.

I reached out to Mark and asked him what it would take to make InDesign an awesome presentation tool. You can see the results of our discussions below.

This first video shows a simple presentation in action.

Why Make Presentations with InDesign?

Here are a few reasons why you might want to create presentations with InDesign and export them to HTML using in5 .

• Sophisticated Master Pages.
• Unlimited Paragraph and Character Styles for your text.
• The ability to create interactivity ( e.g., Object States and Buttons).
• The ability to create Animation (and connect it to Buttons).
• The ability to share your presentation on your own site, including on mobile devices.
• Option to embed HTML ( e.g., complex animation from Adobe Animate or Tumult Hype).
• Option to easily port your presentation to Sales Enablement platforms, kiosks, and retail displays (more on that below).

Setting up Presentation Mode within InDesign

Once you have the latest version of in5 installed, you find two new menu items under  in5 > Enhancements .

The first one is the  Presentation Mode panel.

This panel enables all of the settings shown in the video above, such as Slide Builds using bullet items and animations.

It also sets up the typical slide navigation (keyboard presses and clicking) and enables full screen mode.

It even lets you enable the  Save to Home Screen —the closest thing to full screen on iOS —a capability on iPhones and iPads in case you want to take your presentation mobile. When you save to the Home Screen, you can also have a custom icon on the desktop and your presentation launches without the web browser interface (without going through the App Store).

Check out how the Presentation Mode panel works in the video below.

Presentations of all shapes and sizes

Presentations aren’t limited to slide decks that are presented to a live audience.

Consider these other types of slide-driven presentations.

• Museum displays
• Interactive kiosks
• Retail Store displays
• Tradeshow booth

There are two other types of presentations that I want to address in a bit more depth.

Sales Enablement (what the heck is that?)

Sales Enablement is a process or a platform that makes it easier to sell a product, especially a complex product.

Many sales enablement platforms come with a Content Management System (CMS), shared directories, and mobile apps.

The mobile apps let salespeople access up-to-date presentations on their mobile device (offline) so that they can present to potential customers (even in an elevator).

Thus, Sales Enablement is a bridge between content creators ( i.e., marketing & design) and the people inside their business who need to use that content ( i.e.,  salespeople).

Marketing & Design > cloud repository > salesperson’s mobile device > in-person pitch

There are several platforms that support HTML content for sales presentations.

• Mobile Locker

Self-Running Slideshows

Some presentations don’t need someone clicking through them to be useful.

David Blatner, co-host of Creative Pro Week, asked about adding an autoplay feature so that he could show InDesign-based slides with animation between presentations at the conference.

Check out the autoplay features in the video below.

Custom Slide Transitions

Part of my discussions with Mark Heaps centered around the ability to create “push transitions” (almost like parallax scrolling) where one slide seems to shove another slide over with a continuous background.

You can see examples of that effect, and how to create it in the video below.

To create these effects, there’s now a  Custom Slide Transitions panel under  in5 > Enhancements .

The panel lets you control  in and  out transitions for each slide (InDesign page).

How to make those push transitions super easy

Slicing up a big image into multiple images is doable from Photoshop or InDesign, but it’s time consuming.

Why not make it easier?

That’s what the  Slice Multi-page Image dialog can do.

It automatically cuts up the image for you, and optionally arranges on the pages (adding new pages when necessary) and applies push transitions based on the position of the slices.

See it do the cutting, layout, and push detection in the video below.

Note that the Enhancements described in this article are available to in5 Pro plans (or higher).

in5 Export Settings

Once last thing to make life even a little easier.

I’ve bundled up the export Presets to use with the in5 dialog for presentations.

Drop your email address below and I’ll send you the presets that you can import into your own copy of in5.

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription and get those presets.

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16 replies on “Create Awesome Slides from InDesign using in5’s Presentation Mode”

• Pingback: This Month in InDesign Articles, June 2018 - InDesignSecrets.com : InDesignSecrets

Hi Justin: Awesome this new feature of In5.But I’m unable to make automatic bullets on my text.

I’m using the live text preset to export my work.

Hi Iñaki, Send me your InDesign file and I’ll take a look.

I’m also unable to get the automatic bullets to work. Is there something that needs to be applied to the bullet text box for In5 to know I want to animate them? I’m running InDesign 2018 if that matters

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• Pingback: How to Create a Looping HTML Slideshow with InDesign and in5

how do you save these interactive files to be show when completed?

There’s an HTML file and a corresponding assets folder. The two have to be distributed together, so zipping is usually the way to go. https://ajar.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/26000033384-sharing-zipped-html-files-via-email

Hello Justin,

It is possible to see the file exported by in5 in the computer before publish? Thank you

Yes, in5 exports to the local computer and immediately gives you the option to open the file in your web browser.

I’m using Presentation Mode and On Page Click Animations in a pitch deck. The animations are working perfectly in Firefox and Safari, but not always in Chrome. Do you know why?

We’ll be happy to help with that! 🙂

First, make sure you’re on the latest version: https://ajarproductions.com/pages/products/in5/download.php

If it doesn’t resolve the issue, please send us your files and we’ll investigate: https://ajarproductions.com/pages/contact.php?category=in5&software_issue=bug

Hi Justin, presentation mode works great, but I’m having trouble using my presentation clicker to navigate through the presentation. Anything I can do? Thanks.

• Pingback: Missing Adobe Muse? See How in5 Compares – Ajar Productions
• Pingback: 15 Ways to Publish Digitally with InDesign & in5 – Ajar Productions

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How to Preview in Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a great page layout program, allowing you to design just about anything that your creativity can dream up. But once you get a complex document filled with placed images, text frames, baseline grids, guides, and more, it can be difficult to see exactly what’s going on! 

Fortunately, there’s a simple trick to quickly toggle back and forth between the standard InDesign editing mode and a clean preview of your final output. 

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

Switching screen modes in indesign, previewing bleed and slug areas in indesign, previewing as a full-screen presentation in indesign, a note about display performance, a final word.

• Cycle between Normal and Preview screen modes by pressing W .
• Launch a full-screen preview by pressing Shift + W .

Here’s how to quickly shift view modes in InDesign to preview your document: just press the W key! That’s all there is to it. 

InDesign will hide all object borders, margins, guides, and other on-screen elements such as the bleed and slug areas, allowing you to get a proper look at how your document will look once it’s exported. 

You can also switch between Normal and Preview modes using the Screen Mode popup menu that’s located just below the toolbox (see above). If that’s not to your taste, you can open the View menu, select the Screen Mode submenu, and then click Preview . 

As you probably noticed when trying out the screen mode popup menu, there are a couple of other options for previewing your document, depending on what you want to accomplish. 

The typical Preview screen mode described above shows the trim size of your document without bleed or slug areas, but it’s also possible to see a preview that includes them.

Unfortunately, the handy keyboard shortcut doesn’t work for the Bleed and Slug screen modes, so you’ll have to select these options manually from one of the screen mode menus. 

If you want to give a more polished presentation of your work for a client meeting or a supervisor’s unexpected stop at your desk, you can view a preview of your document in a full-screen presentation mode using the keyboard shortcut Shift + W . 

You can also launch the full-screen presentation mode using the Screen Mode section of the View menu or by using the Screen Mode popup menu below the toolbox, but they all produce the same result. 

This will hide all of the InDesign user interface elements and display your document as large as possible. This is an excellent way to preview digital documents because rich media and other interactive elements will be easily usable. 

To exit full-screen preview mode, press the Escape key. 

As everyone knows, computers are continually getting more powerful, but it wasn’t all that long ago that an InDesign document filled with hundreds of high-resolution images could slow a computer to a crawl.

Adobe balanced this out by using low-resolution preview images for on-screen display to keep the interface feeling snappy and responsive, but many new InDesign users were confused by the fact that their high-resolution images looked bad on screen, even though they printed out just fine.

It is possible to adjust the Display Performance setting in the View menu to show images at their full resolution, but this option is now enabled by default if InDesign detects that your computer has a graphics processing unit (GPU) that’s capable of handling it well. 

Most modern computers can do this easily and should display your images properly during editing and preview.

If you’re seeing blurry images while working with InDesign, double-check your Display Performance setting by opening the View menu, selecting the Display Performance submenu, and clicking High-Quality Display . 

Alternatively, if your computer is struggling, you can drop the quality down to Typical or even Fast to improve performance. 

Just remember: this only affects how images appear on screen within InDesign and not how they will look when exported or printed!

That’s just about everything there is to know about how to preview in InDesign! There are a couple of other different preview modes for checking overprints and color proofing, but they are highly specialized preview modes that deserve their own tutorials. 

Happy previewing!

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Adobe InDesign is without doubt the best and most popular application for desktop publishing in the world. It simplifies the process of making print and digital documents, enabling you to lay out graphics and text exactly where and how you want them.

Like most of Adobe's creative software, it's also incredibly deep. You can create all manner of documents while barely scratching the surface of what it can do. The menus are jam-packed with options.

But you can save yourself some valuable time by learning all the keyboard and mouse shortcuts. These allow you to do more in less time, making frequently repeated actions less laborious.

You can create your own keyboard shortcuts by heading to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts in InDesign.

FREE DOWNLOAD: This cheat sheet is available as a downloadable PDF from our distribution partner, TradePub. You will have to complete a short form to access it for the first time only. Download the Adobe InDesign Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet .

Adobe InDesign Keyboard Shortcuts

Using InDesign With Other Adobe Tools

InDesign is great by itself, but it's even better when used with Adobe's other tools, particularly Illustrator and Photoshop. You can do some basic image editing and vector creation in InDesign, but it's nowhere near as powerful.

Illustrator is, of course, a vector graphics application, so it's ideal for creating illustrations and background images, which you can then import into InDesign. You can also use Illustrator to create vectors of raster images .

Photoshop, meanwhile, enables you to edit raster images, like photographs. It's best if you want to apply filters, resize images, or make other edits that would be difficult or impossible in InDesign. It also converts images from one format to another, which can be essential when creating print documents with high-definition pictures.

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everything disappears in presentation mode

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never-displayed