Adobe InDesign Quick Start Guide
InDesign is advanced desktop publishing software that allows
you to create posters, flyers, brochures, and multipage documents such as
booklets and magazines with text and pictures.
1) Opening InDesign and starting a new document 2)
Navigating around InDesign 3) Inserting Text 4) Inserting Images 5) Inserting
and Deleting Pages 6) Saving your document
Opening InDesign and starting a new document
When you open InDesign, you will have the option of opening
an existing document or creating a new document, book, or library.
When creating a new document, you will have to specify if it
is a document for online use or print use. You will specify the number of pages
in the document, and columns on each page, which you can go back and change
once you’ve started the document.
A document is what you will usually want to create; it is a basic
InDesign file that you can make into a flyer, booklet, poster, brochure, etc.
A book is used if
you want to combine multiple InDesign documents together into one long,
multipage document.
A library is
where a home user can store objects like logos that they use frequently and
want available for all of their documents.
You will have to specify the page size. It defaults to
standard letter-size paper, but it shows the dimensions not in inches, but in
picas, a unit used in publishing. There are 6 picas to an inch and 12 points in
a pica.
If you’re entering a custom page or margin size, you can
enter the size in inches by typing, for example, 8in or 8" for 8 inches
and it will convert the inches to picas for you.
Navigating around InDesign
To jump between pages in your document, you can click the
drop-down arrow next to the current page number at the very bottom left corner
of the page:
You can also use the Pages panel, found on the right side of
the screen near the top of the page. Double-click the thumbnail of the page you want to work on.
To zoom in and out, you can press Command and “+” or
Command and “–“ on your keyboard, or use the zoom tool in the
toolbar on the left edge of the screen.
To pan around, use the panning tool in the toolbar on the
left edge of the screen. Once your cursor becomes a little hand, you will be
able to click and drag to move your page around.
Inserting Text
To type text in your
document, you must first create a text frame.
First click the text tool in the toolbar on the left edge of the
screen. Then click and drag in your document
to draw the text frame.
Once you have drawn the frame, just click inside to type. To
make changes to the text, highlight it first. You can access the text tools by
clicking on the button with the letter “A” in it, at the left edge of the top
toolbar. This will give you a number of text options, such as changing the font
type, size, and colour.
To make changes to the text at the paragraph level (things
like indenting and centring), highlight the text and click the paragraph
symbol at the left edge of the top toolbar.
Pan Zoom
Text tool
Font colour
Click to access font tools Bold and Italics in here
Click to access paragraph tools
Leading (similar to line spacing)
Centre Bulleted List Indents
Inserting Images
To insert an image, first go to the File menu at the top of
the page and choose Place.
You will be prompted
to browse to your image file.
Once you click on your image file and click Open, a
thumbnail of your image will be attached to your cursor. Just place your mouse
wherever you want your image to appear and click once to insert the image into
your document. You can move the image once it has been placed by clicking and
dragging it.
To crop an image, click on any of the handles (little
circles) surrounding the selected image. Click and drag towards the middle of
the image to crop.
To resize an image,
hold down the Command key and click and drag any of the handles. Drag towards
the centre of the image to make it smaller, and away from the centre to make it
bigger. This can sometimes result in a distortion of the height-to-width ratio
of the picture; to resize and keep the ratio the same, hold down the Command
key and the Shift key and click and drag a handle.
To place a border around an image, select the image and
click the Stroke button (looks like a box with a slash through it). You will be
given several border colours to choose from.
Inserting and Deleting Pages
You can insert and delete pages by going to the Layout Menu
and choosing Pages. You will be prompted to enter the number of the page you
wish to delete or the location where you want to the new page. You can choose
Move Pages if you want to rearrange the page order.
You can also insert
and delete pages in the Pages panel on the right side of the screen. You can
drag the thumbnail of the page you want to delete to the trash can in the
bottom right corner of the panel. To add a page, first click once on the
existing page that you want to have come before the new page. Then click the
add page (second from the right) button at the bottom of the panel. The new
page will appear directly after the thumbnail that was selected.
Saving your document
To save your document as an InDesign document (with a file
extension of .indd), go to the File menu and choose Save. However, if you save
to this format, you will have to come back to the library or use another
computer with InDesign CS5 or later if you want to edit it.
You can also save your document as a PDF (Portable Document
Format), which will make a perfect copy of your document that you can read or
print from any computer, but you will not be able to edit it. To save as a PDF, you have to Export the
document by clicking the File menu and then choosing Export.
When exporting an InDesign document, you can
choose to export not only to PDF, but to a variety of file types, such as html
to save it as a file suitable for use as a web page, or jpeg to save it as an
image.
When exporting to a
PDF, you will choose between Print (choose if you plan to print out the
document) and Interactive (choose if you plan to place the document online and
would like to have interactive elements such as hyperlinks) format.
When exporting, and
saving your files, you can save them to a personal storage device (such as a
flash drive). You can save a file and e-mail it to yourself, or save it to a
free cloud storage website, which allows you to upload a file and access and
download it on any Internet-connected computer. Popular cloud storage sites
include Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) and OneDrive(office 365)).
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