Datasheet

Part I: Before You Begin

own tab or free-floating window, depending on whether you’ve enabled

Open Documents as Tabs in the Interface pane of the Preferences dialog box

(InDesign➪Preferences➪Interface [Ô+K] or Edit➪Preferences➪Interface

[Ctrl+K]).

You can tell that a document window shows a different view of an existing

document by looking at the name of the document in the window’s title.

At the end of the document name will be a colon (:) followed by a number.

Newsletter.indd:1 would be the document’s first window, Newsletter.indd:2

would be its second window, and so on.

Tooling around the Tools Panel

You can move the InDesign Tools panel (see Figure 1-2) — the control center

for 32 of InDesign’s 33 tools, as well as for 13 additional functions — by click-

ing and dragging it into position. The Tools panel usually appears to the left

of a document.

The one tool not directly accessible from the Tools panel is the Marker tool.

But you can switch to it from the Eyedropper tool by holding Option or Alt.

(Chapter 6 explains its use.)

To discover each tool’s “official” name, hover the mouse pointer over a

tool for a few seconds, and a tool tip will appear (see Figure 1-2), telling

you the name of that tool. If the tool tips don’t display, make sure that the

Tool Tips pop-up menu is set to Normal or Fast in the Interface pane of the

Preferences dialog box (choose InDesign➪Preferences➪Interface [Ô+K] or

Edit➪Preferences➪Interface [Ctrl+K]).

Tools panel includes tools for creating and manipulating the objects that

make up your designs. The tools in the Tools panel are similar to those in

other Adobe products (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver).

You don’t need to worry about all the tools, so in the text that follows I high-

light just those that you’ll need to know to start using InDesign. You’ll likely

come across the other tools as you work on specific tasks, so I cover those

tools in the chapters that introduce those functions.

The small arrow in the lower-right corner of some tools is a pop-out menu

indicator. A tool that displays this arrow is hiding one or more similar tools.

To access these “hidden” tools, click and hold a tool that has the pop-out

menu indicator, as shown in Figure 1-2. You can also Control+click or right-

click a tool to see the “hidden” tools. When the pop-out displays, click one of

the new tools.

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