Changing Views | Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

Customizing also involves the way you look at your work. InDesign provides a variety of options for magnifying and displaying your work. Understanding these ahead of time and memorizing the ones that work best for your type of work, your eyesight, and your monitor will help you get started with InDesign.

Desktop publishing pioneers in the late 1980s often worked on publications using 9-inch black-and-white monitors, and they spent as much time zooming in, zooming out, and pushing oversized pages around on undersized screens as they did formatting text and modifying pictures. The best present you ‚ or your employer ‚ could give you is a large monitor (two large monitors aren't bad, either). In this era of proliferating panes, there's no such thing as too much screen space. But even if you have a huge monitor, you're going to find yourself zooming in and out and using InDesign's other display- related features to control what you see on-screen and help you work more efficiently .

Zooming and scrolling

When you begin building a page, it's often easiest to display the entire page (View ‚ Fit Page In Window; z +0 [zero] or Ctrl+0 [zero]) or spread (View ‚ Fit Spread in Window) and work somewhat roughly ‚ creating the required objects and positioning them more or less where you want them. After you add text and pictures to your frames , you'll probably want to begin polishing the page by modifying individual objects. At this point, seeing a reduced view of an entire page or spread isn't the best way to work. If you need to work on details, it's best to pull out a magnifying glass. With InDesign, this means tapping into the program's view-magnification capabilities.

You can zoom in to magnifications up to 4,000 percent and zoom out to magnifications as small as 10 percent. Like many other features, you have several options for changing view magnification. You can zoom in and out using:

The Zoom tool
The zoom commands in the View menu
The Zoom pop-up menu or the accompanying box at the bottom-left of the document window

The Zoom tool

If you're the type of designer who prefers the click-and-drag solution when it's available, you'll probably use the Zoom tool to enlarge a portion of a page. Here's how it works:

Select the Zoom tool or press Z if the Type tool is not selected.

At this point you have two options:

You can move the Zoom pointer over the area you want to see and click the mouse. Each click enlarges the view to the next preset magnification percentage. (To display these percentages, click on the pop-up menu next to the Zoom field at the bottom-left corner of the document window.)
You can click and drag a rectangle that encloses the area you want to see. When you release the mouse, the area is centered in the document window. (When you hold down the Option or Alt key, the plus sign in the Zoom pointer changes to a minus sign. Clicking or clicking and dragging in this situation will zoom out instead of in.)

Tip ‚

You never have to actually select the Zoom tool. Instead, use its keyboard shortcuts: z +Spacebar or Ctrl+Spacebar (for zooming in) and Option+ z +Spacebar or Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar (for zooming out).

Zoom options in the View menu

The third group of commands in the View menu, shown in Figure 3-21 let you change the view magnification. Here's a brief description of each command:

Zoom In ( z += or Ctrl+=). Enlarges the display magnification to the next highest percentage. (When no objects are active, the Zoom In command is available in the contextual menu.)
Zoom Out ( z +- [hyphen] or Ctrl+- [hyphen]). Reduces the display magnification to the next lowest percentage. (When no objects are active, the Zoom Out command is available in the contextual menu.)

Tip ‚
If an object is active when you choose Zoom In or Zoom Out or use the Zoom field or pop-up menu, the object is centered in the document window after the view changes.
Fit Page in Window ( z +0 [zero] or Ctrl+0 [zero]). Reduces or enlarges the display magnification of the currently displayed page (the current page number is displayed in the page-number field at the lower-left of a document window) so that the entire page is visible (and centered) in the document window.
Fit Spread in Window. Similar to Fit Page In Window, except you use it if you're working on a facing -page document and want the entire spread to be on-screen.
Actual Size ( z +1 or Ctrl+1). Displays the document at 100 percent magnification. When you choose Actual Size, a pica is a pica and an inch is an inch ‚ if your monitor is appropriately configured.

Tip ‚
Double-clicking the Zoom tool is the same as choosing View ‚ Actual Size; it displays a document at 100 percent magnification.
Entire Pasteboard (Option+ z +0 [zero] or Ctrl+Alt+0 [zero]). Reduces the display magnification so that the current page or spread and its surrounding pasteboard are visible within the document window.

Tip ‚
To switch back and forth between the last two magnification percentages, press Option+ z +2 or Ctrl+Alt+2.

Figure 3-21: The zoom commands in the View menu.

The Zoom box

The Zoom box in the bottom-left corner of the document window and its accompanying pop-up menu, shown in Figure 3-22, offer two additional methods for changing display magnification. To use the box, simply enter a value between 5 percent and 4,000 percent, then press Return or Enter. To use the pop-up menu, click on the arrow, and then choose one of the preset magnification values.

Figure 3-22: The Zoom box and its pop-up menu.

Tip ‚

If an object is active when you choose Zoom In or Zoom Out (from the View menu) or use the Zoom box or pop-up menu, the object is centered in the document window after the view changes.

Pushing a page around with the Hand tool

Sometimes after you've zoomed in to work on a particular object, you'll want to work on a portion of the page that's not currently displayed. You can always zoom out, then use the Zoom tool or the zoom commands to zoom back in, or you can "push" the page around within the window until you can see the portion of the page you want to work on. To scroll, you can use the scroll bars and boxes on the right and bottom of the document window, or you can use the Hand tool (H). Simply select it, then click and drag to move the currently displayed page or spread around within the document window. When you can see what you want, release the mouse.

Tip ‚

To temporarily access the Hand tool when the Type tool is not selected, press the spacebar. The hand pointer is displayed. Click and drag to move the page within the document window. (This is one of InDesign's most useful keyboard shortcuts!)

Changing the view with the Navigator pane

The Navigator pane (Window ‚ Navigator), shown in Figure 3-23, is the home of several display-related features, most of which are available elsewhere (and which I've already covered in this chapter).

Figure 3-23: The Navigator pane.

Tip ‚

If you choose View All Spreads from the Navigator pane's pop-up menu, the page area at the top of the pane displays all of the document's spreads. The more spreads in a document, the smaller each one is displayed in the Navigator pane when View All Spreads is selected.

Object display options

Generally, you're going to want to display the objects you've placed on your pages. After all, what's displayed on-screen is what gets printed, right? Not exactly. For example, text and graphic frames are displayed on-screen with blue borders, even if they're empty, but the borders don't print. In addition to the six zoom commands (covered earlier in this chapter), the View menu includes two other commands that affect how objects are displayed:

View ‚ Display Master Items. When this command is checked, any objects on the currently displayed document page's master page are displayed. When unchecked, master objects on the currently displayed page are hidden. This command is page-specific, which lets you show or hide master objects on a page-by-page basis.

View ‚ Show/Hide Frame Edges ( z +H or Ctrl+H). When you choose Hide Frame Edges, text and graphics frames are not displayed with a blue border. Additionally, an X is not displayed in empty graphics frames when frame edges are hidden. You might want to hide frame edges to see how a page will look when printed.

Tip ‚

When you move an object by clicking and dragging, you have the choice of displaying the entire object (including the contents of a frame) or displaying only the bounding box. If you begin dragging immediately after clicking to select an object, only the bounding box is displayed as you drag. If you pause after clicking on an object until the stem of the arrow pointer disappears and then begin dragging, the entire object is displayed.