Understanding Global and Local Control

The power of desktop publishing in general, and InDesign in particular, is that it lets you automate time-consuming layout and typesetting tasks while letting you customize each step of the process according to your needs. This duality of structure and flexibility ‚ implemented via the dual use of the frame-based and free-form layout metaphors ‚ carries over to all operations, from typography to color : You can use global controls to establish general settings for layout elements and then use local controls to modify those elements to meet specific publishing requirements. The key to using global and local tools effectively is to know when each is appropriate.

Global tools include

• General preferences and application preferences (see Chapter 3)

• Master pages (see Chapter 7)

• Style sheets (see Chapter 20)

• Sections of page numbers (see Chapter 5)

• Color definitions (see Chapter 8)

• Hyphenation and justification (see Chapter 18)

• Libraries (see Chapter 7)

Note ‚  

Styles and master pages are the two main global settings that you can expect to override locally throughout a document. You shouldn't be surprised to make such changes often because, although the layout and typographic functions that style sheets and master pages automate are the fundamental components of any document's look, they don't always work for all a publication's specific content.

Local tools include

• Frame tools (see Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 21, and Chapter 25)

• Character and paragraph tools (see Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, and Chapter 20)

• Graphics tools (see Part V)

Knowing which tools to use

In many cases, it's obvious which tool to use. If, for example, you maintain certain layout standards throughout a document, then using master pages is the obvious way to keep your work in order. Using styles is the best solution if you want to apply standard character and paragraph formatting throughout a document. When you work with special-case documents, such as a single-page display ad, it doesn't make much sense to spend time designing master pages and styles ‚ it's easier just to format one-of-a-kind elements on the fly.

In other cases, deciding which tool is appropriate is more difficult. For example, you can create drop caps (large initial letters set into a paragraph of type, like the drop cap that starts each chapter in this book) as a character option in the Character pane, or you can create a character style (formatting that you can apply to any selected text, ensuring the same formatting is applied each time) that contains the drop-cap settings and apply that style to the drop cap. Which method you choose will depend on the complexity of your document and how often you'll need to perform the action. The more often you find yourself doing something, the more often you should use a global tool (like character styles).

Fortunately, you don't have to decide between global and local tools right away while designing a document. You can always create styles from existing formatting later or add elements to a master page if you find you need them to appear on every page.

Specifying measurement values

Another situation in which you can choose between local or global controls is specifying measurement values. Regardless of the default measurement unit you set (and that appears in all dialog boxes, panes, and palettes), you can use any unit when entering measurements in an InDesign dialog box. If, for example, the default measurement is picas, but you're accustomed to working with inches, go ahead and enter measurements in inches.

InDesign Vocabulary 101

InDesign comes with its own terminology, much of it adopted from other Adobe products. The general ones (not covered elsewhere in this book) include the following:

• Link: The connection that InDesign makes to an imported file; the link contains the file's location, last modification date, and last modification time. A link can reference any image or text file that you have imported into a layout. InDesign can notify you when a source text or graphics file has changed, so you can choose whether to update the version in your layout. (A hyperlink, often also abbreviated to link in casual conversation, connects elements in a Web page to other Web pages.)

• Package: The collecting of all files needed to deliver a layout for printing or Web posting.

• PDF: The Adobe Portable Document Format is the standard for electronic documents. No matter what kind of computer it is viewed on (Windows, Macintosh, or Unix), a PDF document retains high fidelity to the original in typography, graphics representation, and layout. InDesign can both place PDF files as if they were graphics and export its own pages to PDF format.

• Place: To import a picture or text file.

• Plug-in: A piece of software that loads into InDesign and becomes part of InDesign, to add more capabilities.

Not too long ago, only a few publishing professionals knew ‚ or cared about ‚ what the words pica, kerning, crop, or color model meant . Today, these words are becoming commonplace, because almost everyone who wants to produce a nice-looking report, a simple newsletter, or a magazine encounters these terms in the menus and manuals of their layout programs. Occasionally, the terms are used incorrectly or are replaced with general terms to make nonprofessional users feel less threatened, but that substitution ends up confusing professional printers, people who work in service bureaus, and Internet service providers. For a primer on publishing terms, see Chapter 39, Chapter 40, and Chapter 42.

 

InDesign accepts any of the following codes for measurement units:

• x ", x i, x in, or x inch (for inches)

• x p (for picas)

• x pt or 0p x (for points)

• x c (for ciceros)

• x cm (for centimeters)

• x mm (for millimeters)

Tip ‚  

Note that the x above indicates where you specify the value, such as 1i for 1 inch). It doesn't matter whether you put a space between the value and the code: 1inch and 1 inch are the same as far as InDesign is concerned .

Tip ‚  

You can enter fractional picas in two ways: in decimal format (as in 8.5p ) and in picas and points (as in 8p6 ). Either of these settings results in a measurement of 8 ‚ ½ picas (there are 12 points in a pica).