Let us start by creating a new document from scratch, choose file, new, and slide over and choose new document. Now, that is command N on MAC or CTRL N on Windows is the keyboard shortcut for this command.
Now, you will see the new document dialog box and we have several decisions to make here in this initial dialog box. First, you will choose the number of pages. You can go one, two, three all the way up to 9,999 pages per document. That is a lot, we are just going to leave it one for now because we are going to understand the basics of creating new documents.
The next decision you have to make is, whether or not you want facing pages. If you are working on a book or a magazine or newspaper, it would probably make sense to keep facing pages on. If however, you are creating just something like a postcard or a display ad, you probably turn facing pages off.
The next option here is master text frame. Normally, I do not use that feature but on longer documents like books, you might want to turn that on. In this case, I will leave it off and then jump to page size.
We have several built-in US and international or metric sizes that you could choose. In this case, I am just going to leave to the default of 8½ by 11 inches, letter size document, leave it at portrait orientation and then down here in columns, we have a few other decisions to make.
You can type in the number of columns or just use your up and down arrows to create columns. You can also decide whether or not you want a gutter. That is the space that divides the columns that could be zero or you increase this value, maybe you just want it one pica. That is very common gutter value and type that in.
Now, here at the bottom, we get to determine the width of the margins. Think of the margins as your life or your safety area on your document. Frequently, you will use the same margin on all sides of the document. A lot of printers, desktop printers that is, are constrained to maybe printing within the last half or quarter inch of the page. If you are doing professionally printed job then you can probably used full bleed here and sent this to whatever you would like a quarter of an inch is common maybe for a safety area.
I will just go ahead and leave that at a half an inch now, but I do want to click more options and we have a few advance options here at the bottom. The first one is bleed. And when your final document is professionally printed and if you want your images to stretch all the way to the edge of the trim at sheet then you are going to use bleed.
Typically, an eighth of an inch is sufficient. So, “0.125 in” and because the link icon is depressed, we tab out of that field, all four fields will get the same value, eighth of an inch. That means we have an eighth of an inch of breathing room around all sides of the document; top, bottom, inside and outside. Or if I toggle facing pages off, you will see that changes from left to right and when that final piece is printed and trimmed, we have that eighth of an inch bleed, kind of a little bit of give around the document.
Now, we have added bleed to this document and I am going to just want to press the tab key a couple of times until I get to the bottom slug field and at this point, I am going to type in “1in”, one inch. Now, slug is an area of a document that is outside the printed boundaries but is placed to include some job tracking information, maybe who worked on a file, who is responsible for different pieces.
In this case, I am going to include a one inch slug on the bottom. Now, here is the most important part about understanding how bleed and slug work in InDesign. Notice that even though I have made several changes here at the bottom, my page size here at the top is still 8½ by 11 inches. It is still letter size. That is very different from virtually every other layout application even though there will be illustrator because normally, if you want bleed and slug, you have to build that in to your document size. Here is much more intuitive even though you add bleed and slug, your document size stays the doc
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