Chapter 1 RI AL Understanding InDesign Ingredients TE In This Chapter The InDesign approach MA Understanding global and local control Basic InDesign vocabulary Discovering the document window D Surveying the top tools Becoming familiar with tools and panels GH S TE Surveying the menus PY RI tarting to use a new software application is not unlike meeting a new friend for the first time.
10 Part I: Before You Begin Some programs use a free-form metaphor, which means that the method used to craft a document is based on assembling page elements as you would if they were placed on a traditional pasteboard until you were ready to use them. This is also called the pasteboard metaphor, which is an imprecise term because software that uses other metaphors can still include a pasteboard. The nowdefunct PageMaker is the best-known example of the free-form approach.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients structured or partly structured documents, such as newsletters and magazines, it is usually easier to set up documents up front so that elements are sized and placed correctly; the less favorable alternative is resizing elements one at a time later on. Whether you start by creating frames to hold graphics or text or you simply place the text and graphics directly on your page, you’re using frames.
12 Part I: Before You Begin Global tools include General preferences and application preferences (see Chapter 2) Master pages and libraries (see Chapter 6) Character and paragraph styles (see Chapter 14) Table and cell styles (see Chapter 20) Object styles (see Chapter 10) Sections and page numbers (see Chapter 4) Color definitions (see Chapter 7) Hyphenation and justification (see Chapter 15) Styles and master pages are the two main global settings that you can expect to override locally t
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Choosing the right tools for the job Depending on what you’re trying to do with InDesign at any given moment, you may or may not immediately know which tool to use. If, for example, you maintain fairly precise layout standards throughout a document, using master pages is the 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.
14 Part I: Before You Begin 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 (that is, the measurement unit that appears in all dialog boxes and panels), you can use any unit when entering measurements in an InDesign dialog box.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Altered keystrokes: Revised shortcuts InDesign CS3 has changed a few shortcuts that users of previous versions of InDesign should know, so they can adapt accordingly: on the Mac, but the old shortcut of Shift+F10 still works. In Windows, the shortcut remains Shift+F10, but Ctrl+Shift+F10 also works.
16 Part I: Before You Begin Like all great human endeavors, InDesign comes with its own terminology, much of it adopted from other Adobe products. Some general terms to know include the following: Frame: The container for an object. A frame can hold text, a graphic, or a color fill. Link: The connection to a file that you import, or place (defined below), into an InDesign document. The link contains the file’s location and its last modification date and time.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Control panel Tools dock Panel flyout menu Tools panel Reference points Restore button Close button Minimize button Zero point (ruler origin) Main dock Title bar Rulers Panel tab Panel group Panel Figure 1-1: The document window is where you work on documents.
18 Part I: Before You Begin Rulers Document windows display a horizontal ruler across the top and a vertical ruler down the left side. As shown in Figure 1-1, the horizontal ruler measures from the top-left corner of the page across the entire spread, and the vertical ruler measures from the top to the bottom of the current page. These rulers are handy for judging the size and placement of objects on a page. Even experienced designers often use the rulers while they experiment with a design.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients You can lock the ruler origin (the zero point), making it more difficult to accidentally change it. Control+click or right-click the ruler origin and choose Lock Zero Point from the menu that appears. (The Unlock Zero Point command is right there as well, so you can just as easily unlock it.) Locking the zero point is a good idea because it will remind anyone working on your document that you prefer that they not fiddle with the zero point.
20 Part I: Before You Begin To change the view without taking your hands off the keyboard, press Option+Ô+5 or Ctrl+Alt+5, enter a new zoom value, and press Return or Enter. Or press Ô+= or Ctrl+= to zoom in, or Ô+– or Ctrl+– to zoom out. Page controls If you feel like flipping through pages of the document you are creating, InDesign makes it easy with page-turning buttons and the Page field and popup menu.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients To open a new window for the active document, choose Window➪Arrange➪ New Window. The new window is displayed in front of the original window. To show both windows at once, choose Window➪Arrange➪Tile. When you choose the Tile command, all open windows are resized and displayed side by side. (If you choose Window➪Arrange➪Cascade, all open windows are displayed stacked and staggered on top of each other.
22 Part I: Before You Begin Panel display toggle button Selection tool Pen tool Pencil tool Rectangular Frame tool Button tool Rotate tool Gradient tool Note tool Hand tool Fill button Default Fill and Stroke button Format Affects Container button Apply Color button Apply Gradient button Normal View Mode button Direct Selection tool Type tool Line tool Rectangle tool Scissors tool Scale tool Free Transform tool Eyedropper tool Zoom tool Swap Fill and Stroke button Stroke button Format Affects Contents bu
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Figure 1-3: If a small triangle appears in the lowerright corner of a tool, click and hold it to display popout tools. After you’ve selected the Selection tool, here’s how it works: To select any object on a document page, click it. If you can’t seem to select it, the object might be placed by a master page (a preformatted page used to format pages automatically), or the object might be behind another object.
24 Part I: Before You Begin To select objects placed by a master page, Shift+Ô+click or Ctrl+Shift+ click, as with the Selection tool. The Direct Selection tool lets you easily select objects behind other objects and select items within groups. To move a graphic within its frame, click inside the frame and drag the graphic. To move a frame but leave the graphic in place, click an edge of the frame and drag it.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients To begin typing or editing text, click in a text frame or in any empty frame and type away. I explain stories and threaded text frames in Chapter 12. Using the object-creation tools InDesign has a bunch of tools for creating shapes. Part V covers them in more depth, but you should know about a few of them now because they create objects that can contain either text or graphics.
26 Part I: Before You Begin Frame and shape tools InDesign has three frame tools — Rectangle Frame, Ellipse Frame, and Polygon Frame — and three shape tools — Rectangle, Ellipse, and Polygon. The frame and shape tools are redundant because both frames and shapes can hold text or graphics or be empty. Because the frame and shape tools really do the same thing, you might use the frame tool when creating frames that will have their content added later.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Figure 1-5: Doubleclicking the Polygon or Polygon Frame tool displays the Polygon Settings dialog box, which you can use to specify the number of sides on a polygon. Hand tool The Hand tool lets you move a page around to view different portions of it or another page entirely. After selecting the Hand tool, click and drag in any direction. You can access the Hand tool temporarily without actually switching tools by pressing Option+spacebar or Alt+Spacebar.
28 Part I: Before You Begin Using contextual menus InDesign’s contextual menu interface element is very useful. By Ctrl+clicking or right-clicking the document, an object, elements listed in a panel (such as a list of files or styles), the rulers, and so on, you can display a menu of options for modifying whatever it is you clicked.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Some panels have an expand/collapse control. Click the control to show more or fewer options (if all options are displayed, clicking the control will shorten the panel and hide some of the advanced options; if only the basic options are displayed, clicking the control lengthens the panel and show all the options.) Figure 1-7 shows examples of collapsed and expanded panels. Figure 1-6: An sample flyout menu (for the Pages panel).
30 Part I: Before You Begin Adobe has also changed how panels are arranged on screen. By default, InDesign CS3 comes with two docks, one that holds only the Tools panel, and one that holds all the other panels, which I call the main dock. (Well, almost. The Control panel also displays separately, though it’s not in a dock, just by itself at the top of the screen unless you move it.) Note that the main dock cannot be moved from the right side of the screen.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients You can tell that the developers of InDesign have a passion for panels. Because there are so many of them, you might want to consider hooking up a second monitor for displaying them.
32 Part I: Before You Begin Dock resize handle Collapse Dock buttons Panel group close button Main dock Panel group minimize button Figure 1-8: The dock controls on a normal dock (left) and how docks appear when collapsed (middle) and expanded (right). Flyout menu button Flyout menu Panel close button Panel tab Panel hide/show options button Surveying the Menus Although InDesign relies heavily on its panels to present its rich capabilities, it also uses traditional menus.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients There are 10 menus in InDesign for Windows and 11 in InDesign for Macintosh: InDesign (Macintosh only): This menu contains the Preferences menu, where you set much of InDesign’s behavioral defaults. You can also configure plug-ins here. Other functions are standard for all Mac programs, including hiding and quitting the program. Note that none of these menu items’ functions are available in panels.
34 Part I: Before You Begin View: This menu lets you control the display of your document, from zoom level to whether guides, rulers, and frame edges appear. Note that none of these menu items’ functions, except for Screen Mode and the zoom controls, are available in panels. Window: This menu is where you manage the display of document windows and panels, as well as where you set up and work with workspaces. The window display and workspace functions are not available via panels.
