Exploring the Document Window
When you're running InDesign, the first thing to do is create a new, empty document by choosing File ‚ New, or z +N or Ctrl+N, and clicking OK immediately. This gives you a document window so you can start exploring the application. (Never mind the settings for now ‚ you're just exploring.)
No matter what size document you're dealing with or how many pages it has, all documents are contained within a standard window. The window provides controls that help in creating and placing objects, changing the view scale, and navigating between pages. Figure 2-1 shows all the standard elements of a new document window.
Figure 2-1: The standard document window provides controls for managing documents on-screen, changing the view scale, displaying different pages, and placing objects on pages.
Title bar
The bar across the top of the window is known as the title bar. InDesign's title bar not only reports the name of the document, but also the magnification at which you're viewing it. For example, the words Herb Article @ 68% centered in the title bar mean that you're looking at an InDesign document file called Herb Article and you're viewing it at 68 percent ‚ a typical percent value you'll land at when choosing View ‚ Fit Page in Window ( z +0 [zero] or Ctrl+0 [zero]) on a 17-inch monitor. The title bar also includes three boxes for manipulating the document window, as shown in Figure 2-1.
| Tip ‚ | Double-clicking the document title bar on the Mac minimizes the window. In Windows , it maximizes the window (or restores the window if it is already maximized). |
| Platform Difference ‚ | Slight differences exist between the Macintosh and Windows interfaces for document windows. The Windows controls for window sizing appear in the upper-right corner rather than in the upper-left corner. In Windows, the Maximize box performs the same role as the Mac's Zoom box. Note that the Maximize box becomes the Restore box when the document window is maximized (made to fill the screen); the Restore box returns the window to its previous size. Also, in Windows, you can resize a window by dragging any side or corner, not just the Size box at the lower right. Figure 2-2 shows the Windows window-sizing controls. |
Figure 2-2: The Windows window-sizing controls.
New document windows always display a horizontal ruler across the top and a vertical ruler down the left side. The horizontal ruler measures from the top left corner of the page across the entire spread; the vertical ruler measures from the top to the bottom of the current page.
You can use these rulers to judge the size and placement of frames and lines on your page. Although InDesign provides more-precise methods for placing objects ‚ such as the Transform and Control panes, in which you can enter exact values ‚ designers often use the rulers for rough placement while they experiment with a design, as shown in Figure 2-3.
Figure 2-3: This box's top is aligned with the 8-pica mark on the vertical ruler.
By default, both rulers display increments in picas, but you can change the measurement system for each ruler in the Units & Increments pane of the Preferences dialog box (choose InDesign ‚ Preferences on the Mac or Edit ‚ Preferences in Windows, or press z +K or Ctrl+K). If you do this while no documents are open, the rulers in all new documents will display in your preferred measurement systems. If a document is open , the rulers are changed only in that document.
| Cross-Reference ‚ | Chapter 3 explains ruler increments in more detail. |
If you need more space on-screen or want to preview a design without all the layout tools, you can hide the rulers by choosing View ‚ Hide Rulers, or by pressing z +R or Ctrl+R. Most users show the rulers all the time out of habit, but the rulers aren't really necessary in template-driven documents such as magazines where all the placement decisions are indicated by guides and master pages. If you're editing text on a smaller monitor, you might appreciate the space gain of not having rulers, minimal though it might be.
Zero point
The intersection of the rulers in the upper-left corner of the page is called the zero point. Known as the ruler origin in other applications, this is the starting place for all horizontal and vertical measurements. If you need to place items in relation to another spot on the page (for example, from the center of a spread rather than from the left-hand page), you can move the zero point by clicking and dragging it to a new location. The X and Y values in the Transform pane and Control palette update as you drag the zero point so you can place it precisely. The zero point is document-wide, so it changes for all pages or spreads in the document. To restore the zero point to the upper-left corner of the left-most page, double-click the intersection of the rulers in the upper-left corner.
After the zero point is moved, all the objects on the page display new X and Y values even though they haven't moved. Objects above or to the left of the zero point will have negative X and Y values, and the X and Y values of other objects will not relate to their actual position on the page or spread.
All this can be potentially confusing, especially in a workgroup when other users may change the zero point and forget to restore it to the upper-left corner. To solve this problem, you can lock the ruler origin, making it more difficult for users to change it. Control+click or right-click the ruler origin and choose Lock Zero Point from the contextual menu. Granted, the Unlock Zero Point command is right there as well, so users can just as easily unlock it. But even though unlocking it is easy to undo, it's still worth using this feature, because some users won't know how to unlock it and others will be reminded that you don't want them messing with the zero point.
Scroll bars
Standard scroll bars run down the right side and across the bottom of the document window. As in most applications, you can either drag the scroll boxes or click the scroll arrows to move around on a page or move to other pages in the document.
Pasteboard , pages, and guides
Inside the rulers, you'll see a white area surrounding the black, drop- shadowed outlines of your pages (refer to Figure 2-1). The work area surrounding the page is called the pasteboard, and it's designed as a workspace for creating, experimenting with, and temporarily storing objects. You can also use the pasteboard to bleed objects off a page so they'll print to the edge of a trimmed page. Unlike PageMaker (and like QuarkXPress), each page or spread in InDesign has its own pasteboard. There's 1 inch of pasteboard above and below each page, and a space equal to the page width to the left and right of each page or spread. For example, a spread consisting of two 4-inch pages will have 4 inches of pasteboard to the left and 4 inches of pasteboard to the right.
Pages, drawn with black outlines, reflect the page size you set up in the New Document dialog box (File ‚ New, or z +N or Ctrl+N). If it looks like two pages are touching, you're looking at a multipage spread. By default, you'll see magenta lines across the top and bottom of each page showing the top and bottom margins you specified when you created the document. Violet-colored lines indicate the left and right margins (for single-page documents) or inside and outside margins (for facing -page documents). These lines are nonprinting guides that can help you position objects.
You can change the placement of these guides choosing Layout ‚ Margins and Columns, and you can create additional guides by dragging them off the horizontal and vertical ruler.
| Cross-Reference ‚ | I cover guides in detail in Chapter 4 |
If you can't see the guide colors well, you can change them for all new documents. When no documents are open, choose new colors in the Guides pane of the Preferences dialog box (choose InDesign ‚ Preferences on the Mac or Edit ‚ Preferences in Windows, or press z +K or Ctrl+K). The Margins color changes the horizontal guides and the Columns color affects the vertical guides.
Show/Hide Structure button
The dual-arrow button at the bottom of the document window (refer to Figure 2-1), called the Show/Hide Structure button, opens and closes the XML Structure window, which is used in Web-oriented documents based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML).
| Cross-Reference ‚ | I cover XML in Chapter 34 |
View Percentage field and pop-up menu
The lower-left corner of the document window contains the View Percentage field and pop-up menu that lets you change the document's view percent. The view scale can be as small as 5 percent and as large as 4,000 percent, and you can modify it in 0.01 percent increments. You have three options for using the View Percentage field and pop-up menu:
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To change the view to a preset value, click the arrow on the field and choose an option from the pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 2-4.
Figure 2-4: You can choose from a list of preset view percentages using the list in the View Percentage pop-up menu. -
To change the view to a specific value, highlight the value in the field, enter a new value, and press Return or Enter.
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To jump into the field quickly and enter a specific value, press Option+ z +5 or Ctrl+Alt+5, enter a new value, and press Return or Enter. (This method lets you change the view without taking your hands off the keyboard.)
Page controls
InDesign has several controls for maneuvering through pages: Page-turning buttons , and the Page field and pop-up menu. There are also controls for entering prefixes for sections' page numbers and for indicating absolute page numbers in a document that contains multiple sections.
Page-turning buttons
Next to the View Percentage pop-up menu, you'll find a combined page-number field and pop-up menu encased by two sets of arrows, shown in Figure 2-5. These arrows are page-turning buttons, which let you turn pages sequentially or jump to the first or last page in the document. From left to right, clicking these arrows takes you to the first page, the previous page, the next page, and the last page.
Figure 2-5: Buttons on the bottom of the document window (at right) let you flip from page to page.
Page field and pop-up menu
The document window also provides a control for jumping to a specific page or master page in a document. To jump to a specific page number, highlight the current number in the page-number field, enter a new page number, and press Return or Enter. A shortcut to highlighting the field is z +J or Ctrl+J.
To jump to a master page, enter the first few characters of the master page's name in the field. Jumping to document pages can be a little more complicated. Because the page number that displays and prints on the document page does not have to match the position of the page in the document ‚ for example, the third page might be labeled "iii" instead of "3" ‚ there are two methods for entering the page number you want to jump to: section page numbers and absolute page numbers.
You can also use the pop-up menu to the right of the page-number field to get a list of available pages, including master pages.
Section page numbers
A section page number, specified through the Numbering & Section Options dialog box (in the Pages pane's palette menu), is a customized page number. You use section numbers if your document needs to start on a page other than 1 ‚ for example, if you're working on a magazine and each article is saved in a different document. You can also split a single document into separate sections of page numbers, and use section page numbers to change the format of numbers to Roman numerals, letters , and so on.
To jump to or print a page with a section page number, you need to indicate which section it is and what page number is displayed on the page. InDesign provides a default name for sections, starting at Sec1. When you enter a section page number, you must separate the section name and the page number with a colon . For example, if you start the page numbering on page 51, you'll need to enter Sec1:51 in the page-number field to jump to that page. Having to include this undisplayed section information makes this option fairly unappealing, so you may prefer to use absolute page numbers (see the following section).
Absolute page numbers
An absolute page number indicates a page's position in the document, such as 1 for the first page, 2 for the second page, and so on. To specify an absolute page number in the page-number field or other dialog box (such as Print) that involves selecting pages, you enter a plus sign before the number that represents the page's position. For example, the first page in the document is always +1, the second page is always +2, and so on. If you don't enter a plus sign, the first page with the number 1 is what InDesign will assume you mean ‚ this may not be the first page in the document. For example, perhaps you have a five-page section with Roman numerals followed by a 30-page section with Arabic numerals; entering just 1 will go to the first page in the Arabic-numbered section, while entering +1 will go to the first page in the document ( i , in this case).
