Datasheet

15
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients
The Version Cue pop-up menu lets you see the current status of a document
in a shared workgroup setup. You can ignore this expert feature. The new
Preflight pop-up menu helps deal with any issues that can affect printing, as
Chapter 23 explains. And the new Search menu lets you look for files on your
computer and in Adobe Bridge.
Rulers
Document windows display a horizontal ruler across the top and a vertical
ruler down the left side. As shown in Figure 1-1, the horizontal ruler measures
from the top-left corner of the page across the entire spread, and the vertical
ruler measures from the top to the bottom of the current page. These rulers
are handy for judging the size and placement of objects on a page. Even expe-
rienced designers often use the rulers while they experiment with a design.
Both rulers display increments in picas unless you change the measurement
system for each ruler in the Units & Increments pane of the Preferences
dialog box. Choose InDesign➪Preferences➪Units & Increments (Ô+K) or
Edit➪Preferences➪Units & Increments (Ctrl+K) to open the Preferences
dialog box. Your choices include inches, picas, points, decimal inches, cice-
ros, agates, millimeters, and centimeters.
If you change the ruler measurement system when no documents are open,
the rulers in all new documents will use the measurement system you
selected. If a document is open when you make the change, the rulers are
changed only in that document.
You can also create your own measurement system by choosing Custom.
Most people should ignore this option, but sometimes it can make sense, such
as setting the ruler to match the line spacing, so that you can measure number
of lines in your ruler.
If your computer has a small monitor and the rulers start to get in your way,
you can hide them by choosing View➪Hide Rulers (Ô+R or Ctrl+R).
Zero point
The point where the rulers intersect in the upper-left corner of the page is
called the zero point. (Some people call it the ruler origin.) The zero point is
the starting place for all horizontal and vertical measurements.
If you need to place items in relation to another spot on the page (for exam-
ple, from the center of a spread rather than from the left-hand page), you can
move the zero point by clicking and dragging it to a new location. Notice that