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As scientists like to say, "If you can measure it, it must be there," but how
do we measure things in InDesign? Well, measurements show up in a number of
locations including the Control panel, up at the top of the screen, for
example, if I select an object here, I can see all kinds of measurements up
here. They are all in inches. Here in the Rulers, on the side of the document
window, we also see inches; but what if you use picas or millimeters.
Well, no problem. You can change the measurement system to anything you want.
The way you do that is, right-click on one of the rulers, or if you are using a
Mac with a one-button mouse, then Ctrl -click on a ruler and then you get a
Context menu with all of the different ruler options here. You have got Inches,
and Points, and Picas, Inches Decimal; Inches Decimal is the same as Inches,
except it changes that number of tick marks in between each of the inch
numbers. So instead of getting like a quarter inch, you get 0.1 inch, 0.2
inches and so on; some people like that kind of thing.
You could change it to Millimeters or Centimeters or Ciceros or even Agates.
Agates is a little trivia question. What is an Agate? An Agate is 1/14th of an
inch, which is something you probably will never need to know, but isn't that
nice that you do know that now whenever you need some publishing trivia, 1/14th
of an inch -- anyway, most people use Picas or Inches or Millimeters; in this
case, I'll choose Millimeters. We can see that this ruler changed, and the
Control panel changed, so all my vertical measurements changed into millimeters.
So I'm mixing inches and millimeters. If I want to change the horizontal
ruler, I would do the same thing. right-click on it or Ctrl-click with
a one-button mouse and choose the value. A little secret trick here, if I want
both rulers to change at the same time, then right-click or Ctrl-click with
one-button mouse on the intersection between the rulers; that lets me change both
of them at the same time. Let's say I'll change both of these to Centimeters.
There we go, now I have got centimeters on both rulers at the same time.
Now this change to the measurement systems, to the rulers, only affects this
particular document, because this document was open when I made the change.
If I want to change other documents, I would have to open those documents and change
them or if I want to change all new documents I create, well, there is a trick.
I'm going to close all my documents; I won't save the changes on this one, and
then with no documents open, change InDesign's Preferences. You'll see there is
no rulers to click on here, so instead we are going to go to the Preferences
dialog box and on Windows you go to the Edit menu, but on the Mac they have
moved it to a different place; on the Mac you go to the InDesign menu and
choose Preferences and then Units & Increments. So, once you go to Units & Increments and
click on that, it takes you right to the Units $ Increments pane of the Preferences
dialog box and we can see the Horizontal and Vertical Ruler Units. So here
we can change this to Millimeters or whatever you want to change it to, and
as soon as I click OK, it will affect all new documents that I create from now on.
InDesign is full of these hidden but useful features that just makes it more
rich and more fun to use.