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.