Design 2

Today: set­ting up mar­gins and page num­bers. That last post was all the­ory, and as promised, these are the goods. After this we’ll move into plac­ing poems in the book, but today we’re going to do setup. Click each image for a larger, leg­i­ble version.

First, open a new doc­u­ment with 36 fac­ing pages, letter-​​half sized:

Here’s a view of the type tool in InDe­sign CS4, with some expla­na­tions. Very lit­tle (if any) of this has changed since the early days:

As this is a very fast overview for writ­ers, and not design­ers, if it’s not high­lighted, I’m not cov­er­ing it here.* To cre­ate new text, grab the Type Tool (the T but­ton in the palette on the left, toward the top) and click-&-drag out a text box. Now you can type and style any­thing you want in that box. To change the size of the box, choose the Move Tool (the black arrow, also at the top of the left-​​hand palette) and grab one of the cor­ners of the the text box. Size it till you’re happy.

You’ll want to set up your options as a Para­graph Style. Select some text and click on the Para­graph Styles palette at the right (or choose it from Win­dow /​ Type & Tables), click the page but­ton at the bot­tom, title it, and choose your options. Best to stick to only Basic Char­ac­ter For­mats for now. Choose a body font that you think looks good, and call it Body. Then do the same for your titles and call it Title.

Why am I hav­ing you do this? Because now, with your new Para­graph Style selected from the list in the palette, every time you cre­ate new text, it’ll be styled that way, and you can make a change to the Style and affect any­thing that style’s attrib­uted to. Put another way, one lit­tle change affects everything.

If that last bit doesn’t make sense, keep play­ing with it before mov­ing for­ward. If it still doesn’t com­pute I’m happy to take ques­tions in the comments.

Now, mar­gins. If you’re good with type options, we’re going to make a big jump, but fol­low me and you’ll be fine. We’re going to treat mar­gins and page num­bers in much the same way as Para­graph Styles. This means you’ll be able to affect all pages in the doc­u­ment with one change, which will save you loads of time – because it’s inevitable that you’ll end up chang­ing things.

Select the Pages palette (either on the right, or from Win­dow /​ Type & Tables) and double-​​click on A-​​Master, above the other pages:

Your spread (two pages) should look like this:

Now click-&-drag out from the rulers to make Guides.** Set them up as they look best to you, and remem­ber you can always move them around. I tend to go with some­thing like this to start, but that’s only because I like a wide space for page num­bers on the left:

The top-​​most will be for your titles, the lower for the body of each poem. We’re not done with the Mas­ter Pages, so don’t click on another page just yet.

Now that that’s done, let’s set up page num­bers! Make a para­graph style called Page Num­bers. Draw a text box and posi­tion it where you’ll want them. Make it big enough for 2 characters:

Copy it to the other page on the spread, in the same place (hold down option & shift while you drag and it’ll move the box in a straight line across the page). From the Type menu choose Insert Spe­cial Char­ac­ter /​ Mark­ers /​ Cur­rent Page Number.

Bingo! You’re done! You’ve now set up almost every­thing you’ll need to edit the text in your document.

*If you’re inter­ested in really learn­ing InDe­sign, let me emphat­i­cally rec­om­mend lynda.com. Best train­ing site on the net, in my expe­ri­ence.
**Don’t see any rulers? Click Command-​​R/​Control-​​R and they should appear. If they’re not in inches, right-​​click (or control-​​click if on an old Mac mouse) and choose inches.