Reviewing Menu Commands | Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

With so many palettes and panes, menu commands take on a more secondary function in InDesign. Many menu commands do nothing but display a palette or bring a pane of a palette forward. But to get comfortable in InDesign, you do need to know the basic function of each menu.

QuarkXPress User ‚

If you're switching from QuarkXPress, you might get lost in the menus, so charts in Appendixes C and D of this book ‚ which cover how to make the move from QuarkXPress or PageMaker to InDesign ‚ show the equivalent menus

InDesign menu

The InDesign menu, shown in Figure 2-31 contains preference and plug-in settings, as well as the command to exit the program and to hide it. The Services menu option contains Mac OS X functions, not any InDesign-specific options.

Figure 2-31: The InDesign menu.

Platform Difference ‚

The InDesign menu is available only on the Mac. In Windows , the About InDesign and Configure Plug-ins menu options reside in the Help menu, the Preferences menu option resides in the Edit menu, and the Quit InDesign menu option resides in the File menu. The other InDesign menu options are Mac OS X ‚ specific.

File menu

The File menu (shown in Figure 2-32) lets you perform actions on entire documents, libraries, and books, including creating, opening, saving, closing, and printing. The Place command lets you import graphics and text files, and the Export command lets you save documents in different formats such as EPS, HTML, and PDF. The Windows version also includes the Quit menu option.

Figure 2-32: The File menu.

Edit menu

InDesign's Edit menu (shown in Figure 2-33) provides access to its invaluable multiple undo and redo features, as well as the standard Cut, Copy, Paste, and Clear commands. You'll find Duplicate and Step and Repeat here, even though you might be searching the Object menu for them. The Edit menu also provides commands for searching and replacing text and formats, checking spelling, and editing spelling and hyphenation dictionaries, as well as for opening the new Story Editor text-editing feature. It also provides access to color settings and keyboard shortcut preferences. The Windows version also contains the Preferences menu option.

Figure 2-33: The Edit menu.

Layout menu

With the Layout menu (shown in Figure 2-34), you can change the position of the column and margin guides you established in the New Document dialog box, create guides at specific locations, and resize an entire document proportionally. You can also turn pages in a document and insert automatic page numbers using Layout menu commands. Finally, this menu contains the commands for setting up tables of contents.

Figure 2-34: The Layout menu.

Type menu

The Type menu (shown in Figure 2-35) provides all your controls for formatting text ‚ character formats, paragraph formats, tabs, and style sheets. The Story command lets you specify hanging punctuation for all the frames in a story. You can also convert text to a frame and insert special characters using a dialog box rather than keyboard shortcuts.

Figure 2-35: The Type menu.

Object menu

Use the Object menu (shown in Figure 2-36) for layout functions such as controlling the stacking order of lines and frames, grouping objects together, locking objects to the page, and wrapping text around objects. You can manipulate objects, such as changing the number of columns and text inset in the Text Frame Options dialog box or fine-tuning the corners of a frame using the Corner Effects dialog box. For working with graphics, the Object menu lets you fit graphics to frames and frames to graphics, create clipping paths, merge and separate paths, apply colors to some types of images, and create drop shadows. It also lets you insert movies and audio files for interactive PDF documents.

Figure 2-36: The Object menu.

Table menu

The Table menu (shown in Figure 2-37) contains the controls to create and edit tables. Here you create tables, modify them, convert text into tables and vice versa, manage table cells , and control row and column spacing.

Figure 2-37: The Table menu.

View menu

With the View menu (shown in Figure 2-38), you can change the view scale of the document, choose whether objects placed by master pages display, and specify which layout tools display: threads (links between text frames), the edges of frames, rulers, guides, the baseline grid, and the document grid. You can also specify whether guides are locked, and whether items snap to guides and the document grid.

Figure 2-38: The View menu.

Tip ‚

If you're expecting to use the View menu to show and hide invisible characters such as spaces and tabs, look in the Type menu instead.

Window menu

For the most part, the Window menu (shown in Figure 2-39) opens palettes or brings panes of palettes forward. Other commands let you manage document windows, opening additional windows for the same document and redistributing document windows on-screen. Currently open documents are listed at the bottom the menu.

Figure 2-39: The Window menu.

Help menu

The Help menu (shown in Figure 2-40) contains links to Adobe's HTML help files, as well as to Adobe's program-update function. The Windows version also contains the Configure Plug-ins menu option.

Figure 2-40: The Help menu.

Contextual menus

The last interface element you'll find useful in InDesign is the contextual menu. By Control+clicking or right-clicking the document, an object, the rulers, and so on, you can display a menu of options for modifying whatever it is you're clicking on. See Figure 2-41 for an example of several contextual menus.

Figure 2-41: The contextual menu for a text frame (left), for highlighted text (center), and for the document (right).