- Getting started
- Viewing guides
- Preflighting as you work
- Adding text
- Working with styles
- Working with graphics
- Working with objects
- Working with object styles
- Viewing the document in Presentation mode
- Exploring on your own
Viewing the document in Presentation mode
In Presentation mode, the InDesign interface is hidden entirely, and the document fills the whole screen. This mode works well for presenting design ideas to clients on a laptop.
- Click and hold down the Screen Mode button at the bottom of the Tools panel, and select Presentation (
). - After viewing the document, press Esc (Escape) to exit Presentation mode. The document displays in its previous mode, Normal.
- To view the document without layout aids, select Preview from the Screen Mode menu on the Application bar.
- Choose View > Actual Size to see the document at its output size.
- Choose File > Save.
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Congratulations! You’ve completed the InDesign tour.
InDesign best practices
While completing the postcard in this lesson, you experimented with the basic building blocks of a document and the best practices for creating a document. When you create a document following best practices, the document is easy to format, revise, and replicate consistently. Some of these techniques include:
- Start with preflight. As soon as you receive a document to work on, use the Live Preflight feature to make sure the document will output correctly. For example, if the document is missing a font, you will need to acquire that font right away before you continue working on the document.
- Avoid layering objects. Format one object rather than layering objects. For example, the three text frames containing the postcard’s body text have a text inset, stroke weight, stroke color, and drop shadow applied. An inexperienced InDesign user might be tempted to create this look by layering multiple frames. Using multiple objects creates extra work when moving and aligning objects or changing the formatting.
- Thread text frames. Inexperienced users are often tempted to place or paste text into separate, freestanding text frames. The text in these frames needs to be selected and formatted individually. If you flow the text through threaded frames, it remains as a single body of text called a story. Among other benefits of working with a story as opposed to disjointed frames of text, you can select all the text in a story for formatting and limit the use of Find/Change to the text in a story. When working on a longer document, such as a book, threading text frames is crucial to controlling the text placement and entering revisions.
- Use styles for all formatting. InDesign provides styles for formatting objects, paragraphs, lines within paragraphs, characters, tables, and table cells. With styles, you can quickly and consistently format everything in a document. In addition, if you make a change to a format, all you need to do is change the style. For example, in the postcard, if you wanted to change the font used in the body copy, all you would need to do is edit the Character Formats of the Body Text paragraph style. Styles can easily be updated to reflect new formatting and can be shared among documents as well.
You will learn more about all of these features as you work through the lessons.
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Figure 2-31 The best-practices text frame, at left, is shaped like a speech bubble. Text Inset and Vertical Justification options control how the text sits within the frame. The text frame can be moved, resized, and formatted as a single object. At right, a graphics frame is shaped like a speech bubble and a text frame is placed on top of it. The two frames are grouped so they can be moved together, but groups can be more complex to format and change.