From the course: InDesign Secrets

210 Working with pasteboard options - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

210 Working with pasteboard options

- You know this gray area around the sides of the pages? It's called the pasteboard, and at some point, I think in the first version of CC, they started making the pasteboard gray to match the interface color. I've never gotten used to that, so I like to go up to the View menu and choose Match Pasteboard to Theme Color. I'll turn that off, and now I have a nice white pasteboard. I just like it that way. It's my preference, and speaking of preferences, there's another pasteboard option that a lot of people want to change but often don't know how, and that is how to change the size of your pasteboard. By default, you just have a little bit of space above and below your pasteboard. Let me zoom back by pressing command or control minus. I'll press that a couple of times, and you can see that you have about an inch or two and a half centimeters above or below the page. You also have one page width to the left and to the right of your spreads, and that's usually enough, but sometimes you want to put a lot of stuff out on your pasteboard, or maybe you have something really big that you're working with, so people try all kinds of things to make the pasteboard bigger. For example, you can make the page size bigger and then put some object way out on the outside of the bigger pasteboard and then make the page smaller again, and that works, but it's a big hassle. Wouldn't it be cool if there were some easier way? Fortunately, there is. It's a setting in the Preferences dialog box, which you can go to by pressing command K on the Mac or control K on Windows. There are so many little options inside this dialog box that it's not surprising that most InDesign users never look closely inside the Guides & Pasteboards pane. If you look down here at the bottom of this pane, there it is, Pasteboard Options, and this controls the horizontal and vertical margins, that is, how wide and how tall your pasteboard is. Here, I'll make them bigger. I'm going to change the horizontal margins to something like 12 inches, and I'll set the vertical margins to something larger like six inches. When I click OK, suddenly the pasteboard gets bigger. How much bigger? Well, I can zoom back to fit the whole pasteboard in the window, and the shortcut for that is command, option, shift, zero on the Mac or control, alt, shift, zero on Windows. That shows everything on the pasteboard, and, ta-dah, you can see it's way bigger. Of course, it's not just for this spread. If I zoom even further back by pressing command or control minus, you'll see that it's larger on all of the spreads in my document. So there you go. Now that you know how to make the pasteboard larger, you'll have all the space you need to lay out your documents.

Contents