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Before we jump in to actually to putting text or graphics on the page, we'd
better stop and take a look at the various elements of InDesign's Application
Window, because whether you create a new document or open an already created
one, you will see the same things. For example, every application has menus and
InDesign is no exception. All these menus live along the top of the application,
up here. InDesign also has lots of lots of panels; some people call them
palettes. For example, we can see this bar along the
top here. There is another panel right next to it. This is called the Control
panel. The Control panel is probably the most important panel in InDesign.
So, you'll always want to pay attention to that.
Next down along the left edge, is the Tool panel and along the right side there
are a bunch of panels likes the Pages panel and Links panels and so on. And if
you click on one of those it opens it. Click on it again, and it closes. We
will be talking a lot more about all of these panels and how to use them, how
to open them, close them, navigate around them in a later movie. But for right
now, I just wanted to point out where they are.
Now I do want to point out that, obviously, I'm using the Mac OS version of
InDesign, but the Windows version of InDesign is almost exactly the same. There
are a few little changes, but very, very minor. Now one of the changes is that
on Windows the entire application is living inside of an application frame,
sort of, a window within Windows. On the Mac, traditionally, the application,
kind of, floats above the background any other applications we could actually
see here like the OS Finder, the Mac Finder is sitting here so that's why I can
see that folder sitting there. Now in InDesign CS4, Adobe has given us Mac
users the ability to see an application frame and hide all of the other
applications behind it. And the way you do that on the Mac is you'll go to the
Window menu and you choose Application Frame. That turns on the application
frame and the entire application lives inside that frame and some
people like this; some people hate it. You don't have to use it if you don't
want to, but let me to show you what's going on here. The Application Bar
that we saw before it used to be, kind of, a floating palette.
Now is the Title bar for this application frame and I can click on it and drag
the whole window around. I can even resize this by clicking on the edges of it
to make the application window smaller or bigger and all the other panels and
document window resize accordingly. If I want to fill the entire screen with
this application window, I click on the green plus button, this maximize
button and now this fills the entire screen. This is useful if you have
multiple monitors and you want InDesign to take up like a whole monitor and
only be in that monitor, the application frame might be useful for that, but to
be honest, I usually leave it turned Off. I like the normal version of the Mac
OS without the application frame, but its up to you, I just want to point out
that you can have it On or turn it Off. Now inside the application, there is, of course,
a big document window. When you have a document open, the document window
shows you the document in here and let me just tell you a little bit about
what we are looking at here. We see one page and the edge of the page is this
black line around here. The objects on this page actually go out beyond the edge
of the document page in this particular document, you don't have to do
that, but that's what's going on here. But this black line is the edge of the
page itself. Now inside the edge of the page we see these
pink and purple lines and those are the guides, the Margin Guides. The pink
line is the Margin Guide and the purple line is a Column Guide and there is
actually a Column Guide sitting on top of the right edge Margin Guide here, so
that's why you can't see the pink line on the side, but I'm going to be going
into a lot more detail about Margin Guides and Column Guides and all of that in
a later movie. For now I just wanted to point out what all of these things
we are seeing are about. Now outside the document page is this white
area, let me zoom back on this so we can see more of that. I'll be talking about
zooming later on in this chapter, but for now I'll tell you that if
you press Command+Minus or Ctrl+Minus on Windows, it zooms back. So,
I'm going to zoom back a couple of times by pressing that keyboard shortcut and
we can see that there is this big white area outside the document page or the
document spread and that is the pasteboard. The pasteboard is just an area where you can
keep scraps of images or text or whatever; things that you are not ready to
use quite yet. This is just, sort of, a storage area for your document. So that's
what was going on there and each page or each spread has its own pasteboard.
That's different than a program like PageMaker, if you used to use
PageMaker. In PageMaker, the pasteboard is the same for all of your spreads,
but in InDesign it works more like Quark Express every spread has its own
pasteboard. Just a few more things here, I mentioned panels
earlier and InDesign has a lot of panels. We can only see a few of them open
here, but there are like 40 different panels that we are going to be using
throughout this title. I want to point out that you can find all of those panels
here under the Window menu. That's what all of these things are and some
of them are actually hiding inside submenu. So there are a lot of panels that
we are going to be covering through this title, but that's where they all live.
If you are ever looking for a panel, go to the Window menu.
Now the last thing I want to point out is the Help menu. And the Help menu is
very cool, it's funny, but a lot of InDesign users just never get up to look at
that Help menu, but there are really important things here.
First of all, InDesign Help, of course, if you are ever trying to figure out
how to do something, just go straight to InDesign Help, it's a surprisingly
good help system that Adobe has created there and you can search for things
very quickly. So I just want to point out that's the fastest way to get
InDesign to help. If I click on that you see that it brings
up this Welcome Screen here and this shows recently opened documents, it lets me
create new documents, and my favorite part about it, is it gives me links
to great websites. So, for example, the InDesign User Group. You can
get lots of good information from InDesign User Group website and that's a nice
quick way to link right to it. Let's go ahead and close this window. And
just a couple of more things here, Updates; a really good idea to make sure that
InDesign is updated. Adobe is constantly releasing small little mini updates
to the programs. So, every month or so, you should click on Updates and make
sure that you are up to date. Oh! Right above that is deactivate and this
is an interesting one. If you are ever going to take your version of InDesign
off of this computer and put it on a different computer then you should deactivate
first. A lot of people don't realize that and get themselves in trouble,
because you are only allowed two activations per copy of InDesign.
So, you could have one, for example, on your desktop machine and another one on
the laptop, but if you ever need to take it off the laptop and put in on a
different laptop, let's say, make sure you deactivate that laptop first, then
uninstall, and then install on a new machine. So, that's an important one. So,
there are all kinds of good stuffs in here, there is even a link here, an
online support feature that launches your web browser and it takes you right to
Adobe's Technical Support web page and the information changes on the website
from time-to-time. I found it really helpful to check. Again, every month or
two, go check that stuff out. So, now you know your way around the document
page, the document windows, the panels, and so on. Now it's time to learn
about navigation, zooming in and out, changing pages, panning around your document,
and that's just what we are going to cover in the next couple of movies.