From the course: InDesign Secrets
199 Taming baseline grid previews - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
199 Taming baseline grid previews
- What is wrong with this picture? I'll tell you what's wrong. These horrible, horrible Baseline Grid lines. They really bug me. I don't like working with Baseline Grids in general, but I think part of it is that I always have to have these things turned on, or at least they appear to be always turned on, which really impedes my understanding of how this layout is supposed to look. I know that it bothers a lot of my clients too, who are working in long documents that have to be aligned across the spread, which is why you would turn on the Baseline Grid from the View menu, to make sure that things were aligning correctly. Right now it is turned on. If I turn it off, that's how nature meant for the layout to be viewed. Let's turn it back on. But there can be a happy compromise, so that it's not so obtrusive. The key is changing some default settings in Preferences. Preferences on a Mac is under the InDesign menu, and on a PC under the Edit menu, the last item. We're gonna go to Preferences for Grids. The first thing I suggest you change is the Color of the Baseline Grid. I hate this blue color. It's too obtrusive, and it merges with the color blue for the default layer. Instead turn it to something more subtle. One of these very light colors, like Light Gray would be great. The second thing to change is, why is it up here in the white space and out here in the white margins? We don't need it there. Instead of having it start a half an inch, three picas, that's the default, from the top of the page, which makes no sense here, we want it to start at the top of the text frames, and then Increment Every 12 points in this case. So choose Top Margin, and change the start to 0 picas, 0 points. Let's just make those changes and see how that effects the layouts. Isn't that better? We don't see the lines in the white area, and the lines are nice and subtle gray behind the text frames. We zoom in, you can see, that's much better. One more tip that I've found is very useful in taming the Baseline Grid is choosing when it appears. Instead of having to use the keyboard shortcut to make it disappear and reappear all the time, or choose it from the View menu, you can change the View Threshold. I'm gonna jump back to Preferences, and choose Guides. It's this right here. It's set to 75%. What that means is that if I am zoomed in to 75% or more, like right now I'm zoomed in at 100%. If I zoom out here, you'll see it's 75%. I'm going to see the Baseline Grid. The Baseline Grid will disappear if I'm zoomed out far enough that InDesign figures, "Oh there's no way that she's trying to "get things to align across the page "or across frames, so we don't "need to show the Baseline Grid." Well the truth is, that actually, it's usually when I'm really zoomed in that I want to see it. But when I'm zoomed in to even, say, 100%, I don't need to see the Baseline Grid. All you need to do then, is change your View Threshold. Go back to Preferences, go to Grids, and increase it to 100% or 125%. Something like that. I'm gonna set it at 125%, meaning when I'm zoomed in to that amount, that's when I want to see the grid. So I'll click OK, and now because I'm only zoomed in at 100%, I don't see it. I don't see it here. I don't see it at 100%. But when I go to 125% it appears. Maybe you have a really big monitor, and you wanna set your View Threshold to something different, cause really it depends on how large your screen is and how often you need to zoom in and zoom out. So play around with that View Threshold number so that the Baseline Grid only appears when you want it to appear. With the combination of these settings of the color of the grid, where it starts, and when it appears, I think that you'll find working with the Baseline Grid much easier.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
-
-
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
-
-
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-