Introduction to InDesign CS2

When you first launch InDesign, you're greeted with the InDesign CS2 welcome screen (see Figure 8.1). The welcome screen is split into two sections. The top half offers quick links to learn about new features, find helpful tutorials, and find out about some of the extras that InDesign comes with. The lower half of the welcome screen is more functional, in that it enables you to quickly create a new file, create a new file based on a template, or open an existing file.

Figure 8.1. The InDesign CS2 welcome screen.

Creating a New File

To start from scratch and create a new file, choose File, New or press Command+N (Ctrl+N) to access the New Document dialog box (see Figure 8.2). Here you can specify the settings for your document. Although you change just about any of these settings once you've already created your document, this is the only time all of these settings appear in a single, convenient dialog box.

Figure 8.2. The New Document dialog box.

Here's an explanation of the items that appear in the New Document dialog box:

• Document Preset All the settings found in the New Document dialog box can be saved as a document preset by clicking on the Save Preset button. Creating presets of often-used document sizes and specifications can save time. Document presets appear in this pop-up menu after they have been saved.

• Number of Pages This setting determines the number of pages your document will have. Don't worry if you don't knowthere are plenty of ways to add and remove pages from your document at any time.

• Facing Pages A document that has facing pages will specify all pages as either a left page or a right page. If you turn off this option, all pages will be identical. You would use facing pages when designing a document such as a book or magazine, when you have layouts that might be different depending on the side of the page they appear on.

• Master Text Frame If you know you'll be using master pages in your document, and if text will automatically flow from one page to another, using the Master Text Frame option will make life easier for you by automatically creating linked text frames on your master pages.

• Page Size The page size is the actual size of your final page (also called trim size).

• Columns Columns are vertical guides that divide a page. When you specify columns, you define how many you'd like and the amount of space that appears between each column, which is called the gutter.

• Margins Margins are a defined area that encloses the content on your page (also called a safe area). Although you can always add content outside your defined margins, this setting helps you align objects and make pages appear consistent. It's also used (along with the Columns setting) to define the width of text frames when automatically flowing text into a document.

• Bleed Available when you click on the More Options button in the New Document dialog box, the Bleed setting defines a guide that extends past the page size. This helps you create your bleed and also defines an area that InDesign can use later in the workflow. The screen preview, Print dialog box, and PDF Export dialog box all contain an option to either include or exclude bleed. This makes it easy to create your file with bleed from the start, and then decide when to show the bleed and when to hide it later in the process. If you aren't familiar with the term, adding bleed means extending artwork beyond the edges of a page so that the art comes right up to the edge of the page after it has been printed and trimmed to size.

• Slug This feature is also visible when you click on the More Options button. Sometimes people put information at the bottom or side of a file that describes the particular job or client. The information is called a slug, and internally, you want to print it, but externally, you usually don't want others seeing it. By defining a slug area, you can specify an area off the page where you can add any kind of information. Like the bleed setting, you can control whether the slug will print or export to PDF.

After you've specified your new document settings, you can click the OK button to create a new InDesign file.

Creating a New File from a Template

An InDesign template file is a special kind of InDesign file, sporting an .indt file extension instead of the usual .indd usually reserved for InDesign files. Templates are used for designs that are used repeatedly, and they can contain anything a normal InDesign file can contain, including layers, styles, page sizeeven artwork itself. When you open an InDesign template, the file opens as an untitled document (as if you had created a new file). This prevents you from accidentally overwriting the template file.

Did you Know?

If you want to open a template file to edit it, you can choose the Open Original option (instead of Open Normal) when you open the file through the Open dialog box (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3. Choosing the Open Original option in the Open dialog box to edit an existing template file.

InDesign ships with many professionally designed royalty-free templates you can use. When you choose the New from Template button in the Welcome screen, InDesign automatically launches Bridge and navigates to the folder where these templates are installed.

The Open Dialog Box

As with just about any computer program, you can open a file by choosing File, Open or pressing Command+O (Ctrl+O) to bring up the standard system Open dialog box. After you've located the file you want to open, click on the Open button to open the file.

If you want to choose a file from a Version Cue project, click on the Use Adobe Dialog button at the lower left of the dialog box. We talk more about Version Cue in Chapter 11, "Using Adobe Version Cue 2." Of course, you can always use Adobe Bridge to browse for the right file you need.

The InDesign Workspace

Taking a look at the screen when you first start InDesign (see Figure 8.4), you have the standard menu bar across the top of the screen and, directly beneath it, a context-sensitive Control palette. Along the left side of the screen is the toolbox, which contains all of InDesign's tools as well as several other functions. The color proxy indicates the fill and stroke colors (you can choose new colors by double-clicking on them), and the two icons surrounding the proxy enable you to set the colors to the default white fill and black stroke and to swap the fill and stroke colors. Directly below the proxy icons are two icons to toggle attributes between the container and text, and three buttons that can be used to quickly apply three kinds of fills: a white fill, a black-to-white gradient, and none. Under those are the different view modes: Normal, Preview, Bleed, and Slug.

Figure 8.4. The InDesign CS2 workspace.

Did you Know?

Some useful keyboard shortcuts to remember and get used to are the / key to fill with None, and the W key to switch between Normal and Preview view modes.

Along the right side of your screen are some of InDesign's palettes. We discuss what each of them does and how to use them as we go through this chapter.

Finally, the document window is where you work on your file. The black outline is your document size. InDesign lists the filename and the view percentage right in the title bar of each file. Along the bottom left of the window, you'll find a button to toggle the Structure pane, zoom and page controls, and a Version Cue status bar (see Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5. You can use the buttons at the bottom of the document window to quickly navigate to any page in your document.

High-Resolution Preview

Adobe products use a graphics engine called Adobe Graphics Manager (AGM) to draw art to the screen. This technology gives you the capability to see pixel-perfect images in Photoshop and clean smooth vectors in Illustrator. When working in page-layout applications, people are used to seeing low-resolution previews for placed images, but InDesign can also use AGM to display high-quality previews of your layouts.

InDesign actually has three different settings for how art is drawn to the screen, which you can choose from the View, Display Performance submenu (see Figure 8.6). The Fast Display setting grays out all graphics for the speediest redraw, the Typical Display settingInDesign's defaultdraws low-resolution graphics to the screen, and the High Quality Display setting displays graphics at their full resolution. Using the High Quality Display setting slows redraw performance, but placed art and graphics files will appear just as they would in Illustrator or Photoshop (see Figure 8.7).

Figure 8.6. Choosing a display performance setting.

Figure 8.7. A placed Illustrator file as it appears using the Typical Display performance setting and the High Quality Display setting.

Rulers and Guides

By default, InDesign documents have rulers showing, which appear horizontally across the top and vertically down the left side of the document window. You can toggle the view of rulers by choosing View, Show/Hide Rulers. You can Ctrl+click (right-click) on either of the rulers to change their measurement method (see Figure 8.8). InDesign allows both rulers to use different measurement systems (which some workflows require). You can change the ruler zero point (the point from which distances are measured) by dragging the intersection of the horizontal and vertical rulers to any location within your document window, and you can reset the zero point by double-clicking on it.

Figure 8.8. Changing the measurement system used for the horizontal ruler.

Guides are horizontal and vertical lines that you can use to help align objects and create consistent layouts. Guides act like magnets when drawing and moving objects, making it easy to position items precisely. You can click on a ruler and drag a new guide onto your artboard. Guides act much like regular objects do, and you'll notice that once you've created a guide, you can click on it to select it. Shift-click multiple guides to select more than one and move them all simultaneously. You can delete a guide simply by selecting it and pressing the Delete key. When you select a guide, the Control palette shows the coordinates for that guide, and you can specify an exact numerical location for the guide through the Control palette as well. You can even use the Align buttons in the Control palette to quickly distribute guides evenly.

InDesign is pretty smart, in that you can use the marquee-selection method to select guides. But if your marquee area has an actual object inside of it, the object will become selected, not the guides (see Figure 8.9). You can't move objects and guides simultaneously.

Figure 8.9. Marquee-selecting both guides and objects results in only the objects being selected.

Making Selections and Applying Transformations

You select objects in InDesign the exact same way that you do in Illustrator. The Transform tools also work identically between the two applications. If you're a QuarkXPress user, the two selection tools might be confusing at first, but you'll get used to it. Later in the chapter, you'll learn about when to use each of the different selection tools to perform different tasks.