Adobe InDesign Quick Start Guide
InDesign is advanced desktop publishing software that allows you to create posters, flyers, brochures,
and multipage documents such as booklets and magazines with text and pictures.
1) Opening InDesign and starting a new document
2) Navigating around InDesign
3) Inserting Text
4) Inserting Images
5) Inserting and Deleting Pages
6) Saving your document
1) Opening InDesign and starting a new document
When you open InDesign, you will have the option of opening an existing document or creating a new
document, book, or library.
A document is what you will usually want to create;
it is a basic InDesign file that you can make into a
flyer, booklet, poster, brochure, etc.
A book is used if you want to combine multiple
InDesign documents together into one long,
multipage document.
A library is where a home user can store objects like
logos that they use frequently and want available for
all of their documents.
When creating a new document, you will have to specify if it is a document for online use or print use.
You will specify the number of pages in the document, and columns on each page, which you can go
back and change once you’ve started the document.
You will have to specify the page size. It defaults to
standard letter-size paper, but it shows the
dimensions not in inches, but in picas, a unit used in
publishing. There are 6 picas to an inch and 12 points
in a pica.
If you’re entering a custom page or margin size, you
can enter the size in inches by typing, for example,
8in or 8" for 8 inches and it will convert the inches to
picas for you.
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2) Navigating around InDesign
To jump between pages in your document, you can click the drop-down
arrow next to the current page number at the very bottom left corner
of the page:
You can also use the Pages panel, found on the right side of the
screen near the top of the page. Double-click the thumbnail of the
page you want to work on.
To zoom in and out, you can press Command and “+” or Command and “–“
on your keyboard, or use the zoom tool in the toolbar on the left edge of the
screen.
To pan around, use the panning tool in the toolbar on the left edge of the screen.
Once your cursor becomes a little hand, you will be able to click and drag to
move your page around.
Pan
Zoom
3) Inserting Text
To type text in your document, you must first create a text frame.
First click the text tool in the toolbar on the left edge of the screen.
Then click and drag in your document to draw the text frame.
Text
tool
Once you have drawn the frame, just click inside to type. To make changes to the text, highlight it first.
You can access the text tools by clicking on the button with the letter “A” in it, at the left edge of the top
toolbar. This will give you a number of text options, such as changing the font type, size, and color.
Click
to
access
font
tools
Font
color
Bold and Italics in here
Leading (similar to line spacing)
To make changes to the text at the paragraph level (things like indenting and centering), highlight the
text and click the paragraph symbol at the left edge of the top toolbar.
Click to
access
paragraph
tools
Center
Indents
Bulleted
List
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4) Inserting Images
To insert an image, first go to the File menu at the top of the page and choose Place.
You will be prompted to browse to your image file.
Once you click on your image file and click Open, a thumbnail of
your image will be attached to your cursor. Just place your
mouse wherever you want your image to appear and click once
to insert the image into your document. You can move the
image once it has been placed by clicking and dragging it.
To crop an image, click on any of the handles (little circles) surrounding the selected image. Click and
drag towards the middle of the image to crop.
To resize an image, hold down the Command key and click and drag any of the handles. Drag towards
the center of the image to make it smaller, and away from the center to make it bigger. This can
sometimes result in a distortion of the height-to-width ratio of the picture; to resize and keep the ratio
the same, hold down the Command key and the Shift key and click and drag a handle.
To place a border around an image, select the image and click the Stroke
button (looks like a box with a slash through it). You will be given several
border colors to choose from.
Stroke
(for image
border)
5) Inserting and Deleting Pages
You can insert and delete pages by going to the Layout Menu
and choosing Pages. You will be prompted to enter the number
of the page you wish to delete or the location where you want
to the new page. You can choose Move Pages if you want to
rearrange the page order.
You can also insert and delete pages in the Pages panel on the right side
of the screen. You can drag the thumbnail of the page you want to
delete to the trash can in the bottom right corner of the panel. To
add a page, first click once on the existing page that you want to have
come before the new page. Then click the add page (second from the
right) button at the bottom of the panel. The new page will appear
directly after the thumbnail that was selected.
Add Page
Trash
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6) Saving your document
To save your document as an InDesign document (with a file extension of .indd), go to the File menu and
choose Save. However, if you save to this format, you will have to come back to the library or use
another computer with InDesign CS5 or later if you want to edit it.
You can also save your document as a PDF (Portable Document Format), which will make a perfect copy
of your document that you can read or print from any computer, but you will not be able to edit it. To
save as a PDF, you have to Export the document by clicking the File menu and then choosing Export.
When exporting an InDesign document, you can
choose to export not only to PDF, but to a
variety of file types, such as html to save it as a
file suitable for use as a web page, or jpeg to
save it as an image.
When exporting to a PDF, you
will choose between Print (choose
if you plan to print out the
document) and Interactive
(choose if you plan to place the
document online and would like
to have interactive elements such
as hyperlinks) format.
When exporting and saving your files, you can save them to a personal storage device (such as a flash
drive). You can save a file and e-mail it to yourself, or save it to a free cloud storage website, which
allows you to upload a file and access and download it on any Internet-connected computer. Popular
cloud storage sites include Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) and Skydrive (skydrive.live.com).
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