As long as we are talking about the ruler and measurements, let's take a look at the Control pane again. What I am going to show you now is not exclusive to the Control pane but we will show it to you there.
Let's say, I have got my black arrow selected and this box right here is 52p6, 52 Picas and 6 Points. If I wanted to change that by highlighting it or by clicking on the W and I wanted to put Inches in there. Let's put 5in for Inches. I put the in because it's working in Picas, so I am telling InDesign, do the math for me in inches but when I hit Tab here and go to the next box, you will notice that it changed it to 30p.
It does the conversion from Inches to Picas for me. Let's do it again, that was so much fun. But this time let's do 50mm for Millimeters and when I hit Return or Tab to the next box, it converts that to Picas as well. So it's going to stay in Picas because that's my unit to measure but I can enter the shortcuts for different units of measure and they are cm for Centimeter, in for Inches, p for Picas, k for kilometers. Okay, we don't have that one but we do have mm for Millimeters. So if you can memorize those shortcuts for unit of measure, that will be handy for you to work in whatever unit of measure you want to.
I am going to hit Ctrl+Z or Command+Z to Undo. The other thing InDesign does that's really handy is it does the math for us. Let's say I want this box to be half the height that it is. I can put my cursor right after this unit of measure, 22p5.333. What is half of that? Quick. 22P5.333/2. Who knows? So I am going to put divided by 2 and I use the slash (/). When I hit Return, it just put that in half size.
Now some of you Quark users are thinking, Huh, Quark has done that for years and you are correct. The one thing that Quark can't do is percentages. So I could say, I want this box to be 80% so I am going to take Times or the Asterisks 80% and when I hit Enter, it takes that box to 80% size.
Let me Undo that. Let's say we are creating a new document. File, New Document and I want this document to be 8.375 Inches but I want it really to be half that size. I can say 8.375/2 and it does the conversion to Picas and it does the math at the same time. It's not just in this window, it is not just in the Control pane, it is anywhere you see numbers in InDesign, it will do the math and it will do the measurements for you.
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