From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Resizing and rotating objects - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

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Resizing and rotating objects

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- [Instructor] It seems like nothing's ever just the right size on your page. But that's okay. We can resize it. Let's talk about how to scale objects and what kind of gotchas you need to look out for. Actually, the first gotcha is staring right at us. See up here? When you select an image, it says that the scaling is 100% but I am positive that this image is scaled down. So what's going on there? Well, when InDesign scales a frame it almost always sets this value back to 100%. But that's just the frame. The image inside the frame is not necessarily 100%. So remember, you can double-click on an image with the selection tool to select the image inside the frame. And then if we look up in the control panel we can see that this image inside the frame has been scaled down to 37%. Then if you double-click the image again, it goes back to the frame. And you can see that this is at 100%. It's just something you need to be aware of. Most of the time, when I want to scale an object or a group of objects, I just use the selection tool. Just click on the object and then you can drag a corner handle. But that doesn't resize the contents. It just changes the size of a frame. So let me undo that, command Z or control Z on Windows. In order to resize both the frame and its contents you can hold down the command key on the Mac or the control key on Windows. That tells the selection tool to scale both the frame and what's inside the frame. So I'll command or control drag on this corner handle but this scales it disproportionally. So we'd better undo that, command or control Z. So instead, what you should do is add the shift key, command shift or control shift. That scales it proportionally. Now, if you need more precision instead of just dragging and eyeballing it, you can scale using the control panel. But before we use the scale features here you want to make sure that the reference point is set properly. That's this feature way over on the left side of the control panel. The reference point tells InDesign what should anchor, that is what should not move. Everything else will scale around that point. Right now, it's set to the center. And that's not right for this. I want the upper right corner to stay fixed. So let's click on that. Now we could come over to the scale field and change this from the popup menu or just type a value you want. I'll choose 75%. But as I said earlier, InDesign automatically resets this back to, say, 100%. Now, I want to point out one last option for scaling because it's not immediately obvious. I happen to know that I want this to be exactly 884 points wide. But don't try and set that up here in the width field because that will just change the frame. It doesn't scale. So instead of typing it in the width field you should use the scale field. For example, let's change this 100% here to, say, 884 points. We can just type that in. Now, this is a little strange. I'm replacing a percentage with an absolute value. But it works because when I hit return or enter the whole thing gets scaled to that size. Of course, you can scale your text and vector art, like Illustrator art, all you want. But scaling bit-mapped images like this Photoshop JPEG image here, it does have an effect on its quality. If you scale a bit-mapped image up the resolution goes down. Scale it down and the resolution goes up. It's just something to keep in mind when scaling objects on your page. Okay, now let's rotate this frame down here. The easiest way to do that is to go up to the control panel and click on one of these rotation buttons. This one rotates counter-clockwise and this one to the left rotates it back clockwise. Now, both of those go in 90-degree increments. If you want to rotate it in more fine increments you can move to the left just a little bit and change this field here. That's the rotate field. You've got a popup menu here from which you can choose presets or you can just type in your own value over here, like 25 degrees. Now, when you hit return or enter, why did this rotate around the upper right corner? Why was it anchored there and not someplace else like the middle? Once again, it's a reference point on the left side of the control panel. So let me undo that with a command Z or a control Z. Now, I'll click on the center point, go back and change this to 25 degrees once again. There you go. It rotates around the center. Of course, if you like working more interactively you can also select an object with the selection tool and then move your cursor just outside one of the corner handles. When you do that, the cursor changes into this little double-headed arrow. That indicates that if you click and drag you'll be able to rotate it. But in this case, it always rotates around the center point. Now, notice that while I'm dragging you can see a tiny little display to the right of my cursor. That shows you exactly what the angle is at. Then when we let go you'll see the object is rotated. Scaling and rotating your objects is essential when laying out your pages. Now, in the next movie we'll look at another important skill, making copies of your objects.

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