Displaying a new window or split screen - InDesign Tutorial

Scientists and artists have long known that looking at something from two or more points of view offers a perspective and understanding that you just can't get any other way. There's even a word for it in science, parallax. Now InDesign has a parallax feature, it's called New Window, and you can get to it by going to the Window menu and choosing from the Arrange sub-menu, New Window. When you choose New Window, you get a second window open on your screen that shows the same document, two windows one document, and this is kind of cool. Let me show you one of the ways that you might use this. I'll click on the window on the left to make that active. You can see it's active, because this is the one that has the rulers around it. And I'm going to scroll down a little bit and zoom in on the beginning of this article. I'll just press Command+spacebar or Ctrl+spacebar on Windows and drag out a marquee, so I can see the beginning of the article here. Now over here on the right side, I'm looking at the end of the article. I'll click over here, and let's go ahead and just zoom in on this so we can see this a little bit better. There we go. That's the end of the article. On the left side at the beginning of the article, I'm going to make some edits. I'll switch to the Type tool, I'll select some text, and then I'll press the Delete key. What happens? Well of course, the text reflows throughout the entire article and I'm left with a space at the end of the article. Ordinarily when I'm making text edits, I can't see that kind of thing. I can't see in two places at the same time, but with New Window I can. That's very handy when doing edits. Here's another way that I often use New Window. I'll come over to the right side, just click on that side, and I'll scroll up and move to the left here, so I can see the same page on the left and right. But on the right side I see the whole page, on the left I can zoom way in to see how some thing is going to look. Let's go ahead and pan down here, so I'm seeing this little caption, and I'm going to use the Selection tool to move that caption down just a little bit, and we can immediately see that while I'm fine-tuning on the left, I'm seeing its effect on the whole page on the right. If you're importing RGB images into InDesign, you may want to see what those are going to look in CMYK, right? Well, here's another way you can use New Window. On the left side, I'll press Command+0 or Ctrl+0 on Windows, on the right side I'll do the same thing, so we're looking at exactly the same thing on the left and right. But over on the right, I'll go to the View menu, choose Proof Setup, confirm that I'm going to be viewing this in CMYK, and then choose Proof Colors. Now I'm looking at the same page. On the left side it's in RGB color, on the right side it's CMYK. It's a little bit more desaturated, more accurate to what the final print is going to look like. I'm going to close that window here, notice that you close a new window just like you'd close a normal window, just click on that little X. Don't go to the File menu and choose Close. That closes the document itself. In this case you only want to close that single window. I want to show you an alternate way to get a new window on your document, because in InDesign CS6 and later, we can go down to the lower right corner of the screen, way down here, we'll see this little button. When you click on that, it splits the window into two. Now in this case it's not two different windows, it's a single window split into two, but we get the same kind of effect. Two views on the same document. By the way, when you this you can change the size of these windows, just place your cursor over the middle point, this gray line, and then you can drag to the left or right. Now if we want to go crazy, we could add another view. We'll go to the Window menu, Arrange > New Window, and we have three views on the same document. Over on the right hand side, I'm going to scroll over to the left a little bit so we can see the whole page. In the middle, I'm going to select this object way down here, this little caption, and I'm going to zoom in just by pressing Command+Plus, or Ctrl+Plus on Windows, so I can see it better, and I'm going to edit some of the text in here. I'm going to change the color. I'll switch to the Type tool, I'll select the text that I want to change, and then I'm going to change this color up here in the Control Panel. Let's make it orange. Now you'll notice when you do that it turns blue. Is it really blue? No, of course not. It's orange, but because it's selected, InDesign reverses the color. To see the orange text, I'm going to click on the left window, and I'll come over here and grab this Selection tool, grab the same frame and zoom in again with Command+Plus or Ctrl+Plus, all the way until I see it. And you can see that on this side, because the frame is selected with the Selection tool on this window, I actually see the orange text. In the middle window it's still selected with a Type tool, and on the right I can see that it's Greeked out, so I can't even see anything. It can be incredibly helpful to work with two or more windows open on the same document, especially when you have a large screen or two monitors, but for some reason I find that people have to force themselves to use this feature two or three times before they really get comfortable with it. But after you do, you're going to be hooked.