Saturday, 14 January 2017

InDesign Quick StartUp and Running


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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