From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

New documents - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

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New documents

- [Instructor] Now that you know your way around InDesign a little bit, it's time to make a new InDesign document. This here is called the homepage, and you can make a new InDesign document by clicking this little Create New button over on the left, or head up to the File menu, chose the New sub menu, and then choose document. Now if your new document dialogue box looks really different from this one, you're probably using the old legacy style. You can change it back to this newer version by opening InDesign's preferences dialogue box and turning off the setting called use legacy new document dialogue. Now the very first thing you need to decide on is what kind of preset to use when creating your new document. In the old legacy dialogue box, this is called the intent, but here, you choose either print, web, or mobile in these buttons across the top. Now web is a little bit of a misnomer. It does not mean web like a webpage or an HTML page. It just means a document that is going to be delivered on screen, like an interactive file. They really should change that name. Now two things happen when you choose this web preset. First, of course, it shows you page sizes that are typical screen dimensions, and measurements are set to pixels. Also you should know that all your colors in the document are set to RGB. Mobile is really not that different from web, so I usually just ignore it. And print, well just to be clear, print does not mean that you're necessarily going to be printing this document. For example, maybe you're making a PDF that you're putting up on your website for somebody to read, and then maybe they'll print it out. Like a product sheet for some business. You could still use print for that. Now you can see down here that Adobe is offering you a number of templates from their Adobe stock service here. Some of these are pretty good, and some are, well, not the best quality, but I'm just going to start with creating a new file from scratch, by clicking the view all presets button here and then choosing one of these page presets. Like, if you know you're going to be printing on A4 paper, and you know the final size will be A4, then go ahead and choose that here. Or if you want an American eight and a half by 11 page, click letter up here. Now these presets are just starting points. You can always adjust the settings over here. Like the width and the height of the page. You can just type a custom height and a width into these fields here if you want. And you can change what measurement system you want over here. For example, I'll choose centimeters. Next, you can also click these orientation buttons over here on the right. All these do is literally swap the values in the width and the height fields. Next you need to decide, over here, whether this document will be set up for facing pages. Now facing pages should only be used for documents that have a left hand and a right hand page, a verso and a recto. Like a book or a magazine. If you're doing a one page flyer or maybe a two-sided brochure or something, then you'll want to turn that off. Anything that does not truly have facing pages, turn it off. This next check box down here, primary text frame, is used for things like books where you have a story that goes from one page to the next over a lot of pages. This primary text frame feature will automatically add a text frame to your master pages. I'm going to be covering this in a later chapter, but for now I'm just going to tell you that unless you're making a book, you should probably leave that off. Down here, we have columns. Most documents just have one column, but if you know that you're going to have two or more columns in your document, go ahead and change it here. For example, I'll set that to two. The gutter amount is the amount of space between each column of your document. For example, I'll change this to two centimeters. Now I should point out there are two other important settings in here, but a lot of people don't see them because they are hidden. You need to click on these little triangles, like this one next to margins. And when you do that, you can see that this whole thing scrolls. See, like this. Make sure you check out all the options down here. So margins are just guidelines. There's nothing stopping you from putting objects outside the margins, but margins are helpful reminders of where you should put your text frames and your graphic frames and so on. And see this little button over here that looks like a chain? That tells InDesign to keep the values in all of these fields the same. If I click it, it un-links those fields. So now if I change just one of them, let's say the top, to say, four centimeters, and then I hit tab? You'll see that it changes independently of the other fields. I'm going to talk about this last feature, bleed and slug, in a later chapter. So, great, I'm going to go ahead and click create. And I'm good to go. There's the document. You can see the column guides and the margin guides. But after you create your document, you might realize that you need to make changes. Don't panic; in a later chapter, I'll show you how you can change all of those settings. Making a new document with the proper settings is the first step in creating a strong foundation for your publication. But it's just the first step.

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