Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Even if you had a super high- resolution computer screen, you would still
sometimes need to zoom in to see details and zoom out to see the big picture.
It's all possible in the InDesign, of course, once you know where to look.
For example, up here in the Application bar, there is a view percentage and I
can click on that little pop-down menu and choose 100% to go right to 100% or
maybe 200% to go to 200%, as simple as that. Or I can actually change this; if
I click inside that field I can type anything I want. Let's say, go to 46%;
press Enter and it zooms back to 46%. By the way, if I close the Application bar,
just something you should know; if you happen to hide that Application bar, then
that same percentage field shows up down in the lower left corner of your document
window hiding way down there. So you can do all the same sorts of things
down in the lower left corner of the window, if you have the Application bar closed.
It's just one of those preferences, something you should know about.
Another way to zoom in and out is to use the View menu. We can see here zoom
in, zoom out. We talked about these keyboard shortcuts in earlier movies;
Command+Equals or on Windows it's Ctrl+Equals. I usually think of that as
Command/Ctrl+Plus, because it's the same key on the keyboard; but it's
Command+Equals, technically, or to zoom out, Command+Minus or Minus or
Ctrl+Minus on Windows. So to fit the whole page in the Window, Command+0
or Ctrl+0 on Windows or to fit the Spread in the window, I use this all
the time, Command+Option+0 or Ctrl+Alt+0 will fit the entire Spread in the
Window, when you are working. Now this one down here, Actual Size, it's not
really actual size technically; it's just 100% view. It will just zoom you to 100%
view. So for example, if I press Command+1, I go
to 100% view and there is also, I should point out, this only says 100% view
here; there is a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts, which InDesign hides from
you. I don't know why they don't put them in this menu; maybe it would make
it too long. But it's very easy, and you should know about them. Command+2 or Ctrl+2
on Windows, zooms to 200% or Command+4 or Ctrl+4 on Windows, zooms to 400%.
Now you can get it really, really close here. Or Command+5 or Ctrl+5
on Windows, doesn't go to 500%. It goes all the way back to 50%.
So Command+1, 2, 4 and 5 or Ctrl on Windows; those are very important to keep
in mind. But, there is one problem with using those, all of these techniques
that I have talked about so far, and that is, it does not give you any control
about where you are zooming. For example, if I press Command+4 or Ctrl+4 on
Windows, it zooms right in on these chocolates. But that's not where I wanted
to go; I wanted to go in the upper left corner of the page, so that's really frustrating.
So let me show you another technique for zooming that you need to know about.
I'll go back to fit the whole page in the window with Command+0 or Ctrl+0 on
Windows, and I want to zoom in, let's say on this area here. So I'm going to
use the Zoom tool down here at the bottom of the Tool panel. But I'm not going
to choose that from the Tool panel, because to me that would just be too inefficient.
So instead, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut for that Zoom tool. Now on
the Macintosh, I press the spacebar first and then the Command key, and you can
see it turns into a little icon of a magnifying glass with a + symbol in it.
Now that lets me zoom in just by clicking. On Windows, you can do spacebar+Ctrl
or Ctrl+spacebar. It doesn't matter. But I make the point here, because on the
Mac OS, if I press Command+spacebar, well that triggers the Mac OS spotlight
feature and that's really annoying to me. So on the Mac, I usually do spacebar +Command
and then that bypasses the spotlight entirely and then I click. On Windows
it doesn't matter; you can do a spacebar first or the Ctrl key first, either
way. Now let's use zoom in, right. How do I zoom out again? I just add the Option
or the Alt key to that. So the spacebar+Command+Option will give me the magnifying
glass with a minus sign in there. That lets me zoom out, or on Windows,
it's Ctrl+Alt+spacebar, will let you zoom out. So that's very, very handy.
One more thing I should tell you about the Zoom tool, and that is, if you want
to zoom in on a particular area of your page, you don't necessarily have to
click, click, click to get there. You can use the keyboard shortcut to get the
Zoom tool that you want and then drag an area around. I'm just dragging up a
marquee rectangle around this area. When I let go over the mouse button, it
zooms right in on that. So that's a very fast way to zoom right in
on exactly what you want to look at. It's really worth of time to go over all these
navigation and zoom features a number of times and get them down pat, because
these are the features that you are going to use a 100 or even a 1000 times
each day.