167 Creative uses of the Slug area

- One of the most overlooked features in InDesign, in my opinion, is the Slug guide feature. And, you'll find that in the New Document dialogue box. If you go down here under Bleed and Slug, you may be very familiar with the Bleed guide, that's that red guide that gets drawn outside of every page, that helps you to drag images and other objects to bleed them enough for your printer's specifications. And, because the Bleed guide is usually the same all the way around, this set of fields is locked.

So, if I typed, under Bleed, p9, for nine points, and press tab, then they would all get filled in. The Slug guide is the area that most people ignore, that I think that you can really use. That's what I want to show you. These four fields are not locked together, so you can put in a separate amount of Slug guide for the outside versus the top, for example, of your document. Let me turn on Preview, and I'll do the Outside, and I'll say, let's add one inch. So, I'm typing one and then 'in', to override the default's pica measure, and you can see that it has created a guide one inch out from the outer edge of my page.

The point of using a Slug guide is that anything that I put in InDesign in this paste board area bounded by the Slug guide and the trim edge of the page, can appear in a pdf or in a printout. Of course it's not actually going to be printed, because it'll be trimmed off outside the trim edge. But, it is something that goes and travels along with the document. Let me show you an example. You don't always have to do it right when you creating a new document, you can add a Slug guide to an existing document.

For example, here I have a magazine set up as spreads. And, I want to go ahead and add a Slug guide to this. So, to do that, I'll go to the File menu and choose Document Setup. Twirl open Bleed and Slug, if it's not showing already. You can see this document already has a nine point bleed set up. You can see it surrounding the spread trim area. I want to add a Slug just to the top. So, I'm gonna add a half inch slug, 0.5 in, and click OK.

What that has done is add a half inch of area at the top of every one of my spreads. And, inside of this area, I might put something like a variable for the current date. I'll just drag out a text frame, let me zoom in a bit, and go to Type, Text Variables, Insert Variable, Modification Date. Now, every time that I make a printout or export to pdf, there's an option for me to include the Slug area, and, so this will always have the modification date of when this printout or this pdf was created.

It's extremely useful. And, I'll show you what this looks like in a pdf in a minute. Some of my clients, like to use the Slug area for a little approval stamp. Here, I created one just on the fly but I've seen ones that use their logo and so on. You know how this works, in the paper world, that a little approval stamp gets added on top of the document and people sign off on it to show their approval and they date it. Well, you can actually add this, automatically, to all of your pdfs and your printouts. You create the little approval stamp.

And, then, we're just going to make a Slug that will fit that. So, I'll go to Document Setup, turn on Preview, and make sure that my Outside Slug is something like three inches. So, when you're dealing with facing pages documents, then, the Outside is for both sides. So, we can actually put this on either side. And, the problem with this though, is that it's only going to be on that first spread. So, I'm going to take this, and cut it, and put it onto the Master Page, which also has the Slug guides.

I'll just paste and place. And, now, let's go ahead an export just the first spread, to pdf. So, SanFrancisco, we just want the first spread, as Spreads. You have to remember to go under Marks and Bleeds, and to turn on Include Slug Area otherwise it's not going to be included. And, we do want to include the Bleed Settings. We'll include All Printer's Marks and we'll click Export and there it is. So, if we had exported every single page, we would see this appear in every single page because it's our Master Page.

And, now this entire thing can be printed out and people can go ahead and sign off on it so it's a permanent part of the document. A lot more convenient and easier to work with than a form that's stapled to the pdf or to the printout. Those are just a couple examples of why you might consider using the Slug area feature in your next InDesign document.