From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Guides and measurements - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Guides and measurements

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- [Instructor] Adding guides to your documents is really helpful, because it maintains consistency and it helps you lay out pages fast. The basic way to add a guide to a page is simply by dragging it out of the ruler. For example, I have my Brochure document open from the Exercise Files folder, and I'm going to go up to the horizontal ruler at the top of the screen, and I'll click inside that ruler and drag out a guide. Now, here's a trick. If I let go of the mouse button when I'm on top of a page, I get a page guide. This is a three-page spread, so we just get that tiny little guide across one page. Now I'm going to drag out another guide from the ruler, but this time I'm going to hold down my mouse button until I'm on top of the pasteboard. When you do that, you get a pasteboard guide. Some people call this a spread guide because it goes across all the pages on my spread. Now, once I have a guide on my page, I can move it by simply clicking on it with a Selection tool, that's the black arrow tool in the Tool panel, and then dragging it into place. But guides are just like objects on my page, so I can get really precise by setting the measurement over here in the Properties panel. For example, I'll change the Y coordinate for this guide to, say, 0.8 inches. Remember that I can type any measurement system I want in any field, and when I press return or enter, the measurement updates to the current document setting, in this case points, and that guide moves to just where I want it. Okay, now I'm going to select this text frame in the middle, and I'll drag it up. You'll notice that as I drag it, the top of the frame snaps to that guide and the side edges snap to the margin or column guides. That's what guides do. They snap objects to them. I'll move this over, too, and I'll drag this image, too, and you'll see it's going to snap into place, not because there's a column guide here or a pasteboard guide, but because of what's called Smart Guides, it sees the other image to the left and it automatically aligns to it. Let me show you again. As I drag, you'll see these little green lines appear, and those green lines that appear temporarily are Smart Guides. Now, as you can see, guides, both the kind that I've been adding, and also Smart Guides and the margin guides on the side of the page, they're all kind of magnetic, and that's usually very helpful, but sometimes you want to get close to a guide but not snap to it. Fortunately, you can turn off that snapping behavior. To do that, go to the View menu, come down to Grids & Guides, and then turn off Snap to Guides. You can also do the same thing to turn off the Smart Guides. Now, when I drag this image around, you won't see those Smart Guides anymore, and you also won't see a snap to any margin or column guides, even though I'm really close. So, that's good to know about. But Snap to Guides is my friend, so I'm going to turn both of those on. I'll go back to View and turn on Snap to Guides, and then I'll do the same thing and turn on Smart Guides. I really like those features. You know, I should mention something important about these rulers. You see how they're set to points and there are 72 points per inch? But what if you want to work in millimeters or inches? Well, no problem. The trick is to change your document preferences by going to the Preferences dialogue box, and I can get there on the Mac by going to the InDesign menu. On Windows, you would go to the bottom of the Edit menu. In either case, I want to choose Units & Increments. Up here at the top are the increments that all my rulers are going to be using. InDesign lets you change dozens of different preferences inside this dialog box, and we'll be talking about a few more of them later on in this chapter. But, for right now, I'm just going to focus on these. You have a bunch of options in here. I'll choose Centimeters. When I click OK you can see the rulers update. Oh, one other quick tip about those measurements. You can also change that measurement preference by right clicking on this little square where the two rulers meet. If you do that, you see all the same values. For example, I'll choose Picas. You see how everything updated? Now, if you get tired of making that change for each of your documents one at a time, here's a little tip. If you change the preference inside the Preferences dialogue box while no documents are open, it'll change for all new documents that you make. As you'll catch on in this course, I love little tips and tricks that speed up your work like this.

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