What we are going to do now is create a brand-new document and we can either go up to the File Menu and go down to choose New>Document over here or just use the standard keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+N or Command+N on the Mac. So I am actually going to go ahead and do that.
Now the dialog box that appears gives us access to everything we need to set up the page. So we are only going to do a one page document to start with. I am going to turn off Facing Pages. Now this is going to be a template maybe for a postcard. So the chances are the postcards won't be a Spread, they will be just one at a time, in this case, we turn off the Facing Pages option. We can also come down here and change the size.
Now this is important. I previously set my Preferences to use millimeters as the units. Remember I said, it doesn't really matter which one you have because we can always change from one to the other at a time. So you might still have yours set to inches and mine is set to millimeters. I need a file size of 5 inches square, that's going to be the size of this postcard. Well, even though I have millimeters in here, if I just highlight the Width value here and type in 5 in or even 5 and the double quotation marks("), and just hit the Tab key to go to the next value, you can see that InDesign automatically converts 5 inches to a 127 millimeters. So this makes it very easy for us to work with sizes regardless of what we have got our Preferences set to.
So now that I know it's a 127, I can also key in a 127 on the Height as well because our postcard is going to be square. Now I will make sure that there are no columns or gutters on this particular layout, but we do want to specify a different margin. So there is only going to be a 10 millimeter gap around the outside. Now one cool thing about this dialog is this small link icon. If you go ahead and turn that on, then any change we make to anyone of these four values will affect the other three as well. So we can simply highlight the first one here, say maybe 10, hit the Tab key to go to the next value and you see all four of them change.
Now this dialog does actually expand. You see there is a More Options button up here on the right hand side. Go ahead and click that, I will just pull this up into screen so we can see it. You will notice that there are settings here for Bleed and Slug. Now slug is an area that just sits on the outside of your document that allows you to put print information and very important color details in there that will also print out. Normally, anything you position outside of a document's boundaries will not print out, no matter what you do to it. This tells InDesign to allow that extra space to be used and that's where you would specify.
We are not going to use that but we would specify Bleed. So we have images on these postcards that might need to bleed off the edge ready for when they trim. This is where we would specify. Again, there is a link icon on the right hand side. So when we change this value here, say on the Top to just 5 millimeters, as soon as we hit that Tab key, we than jump across and have all of them set to the same.
Now what we have done here is specified a different file size, a different margin, and a different bleed. It would be very cool if we could save this now as a preset that we can call on again later. Well, this is something you can do by clicking Save Preset up here on the right hand side. Now go ahead and do that, we will just give this a name of Test Postcard for now. Once you have done that, click OK. Come back to the Preset Menu here at the top and you will see the Test Postcard does now exist. You can always go back and choose the Default letter size and switch between those as and when you need them.
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