293 Modify the Pages panel view

- [Narrator] I find it interesting, and a little aggravating, to know that most InDesign users never bother modifying the default settings, like for example, what links shows by default, or what the pages panel shows by default. You know, some engineer came up with this. Oh, this is how I think most people want to use this panel, and that's how it ships, and if you never change it, you're doing yourself a disservice. You should modify these things for how you work, just like when you get into a car you always select your favorite radio stations.

You don't live forever in a car with whatever the dealer thought would be your favorite radio stations, right? In this video, I want to talk about modifying the pages panel view. This is probably one of the most used panels, unless maybe you only design single page posters, in the program. You can move page to page here in the pages panel, or of course from the pop up menu down here. But this is a little meager compared to this. Now one of the first settings that I would change in the pages panel is the size of these icons, and you do so from the pages panel menu.

Go down to panel options, and you'll see different size icons that you can have for the pages and for the masters up here. Now medium is kind of small. I actually like extra large, usually. I wish there was a preview button here, but there isn't. Or if you really want to get up close and personal with your pages you could choose jumbo. This does not slow the program down at all, other than the first time it needs to render these thumbnails. I'm going to just go to extra large for now, and then the same thing with masters.

Masters I usually keep small, but if I have a lot of different masters and I'm trying to figure out which master is for what and the name isn't that forthcoming then I'll choose a larger master size. You can also choose which icons appear to the right of these spreads and we'll look at that in a second. And finally under panel layout, do you like your masters on top or on the bottom? I think only crazy people want them on the bottom, so I would just leave them on the top, and then when you resize the panel, what do you want to happen to the page icons inside? Do you want them to stay the same size? Do you want them to grow proportionally? Let's just leave that as is.

All right, so we're going to look at extra large icons. There, that's a little easier to see, isn't it? I think so. Another option that I like to change in pages is how many spreads appear, especially if I'm working on a large monitor. I can go to view pages and choose horizontally, instead of vertically, and that way if I have this pages panel open on a second monitor, or I have a really big monitor and the pages panel is off to the right, why do I need to keep scrolling endlessly for a long document, when I can see multiple spreads at once? I think this is a lot easier to work with.

I can even move it further out. Look at that. I like that. Let's go ahead and change these to jumbo, just for fun, to see what that looks like. Whoa! (laughing) Well, you know, it's a wonderful feature, and you pay for it, so why not use it? Let me grab this guy. There we go. It would be nice to actually see the text, but I think the text has to be larger. Like i can see here a painting in Spain. All right, so let's, I don't like jumbo. It's a little too big for me, so I'll go back and change that to, what did I have? Extra large, that's what I like, okay.

And I'll put this back here, but I do like it horizontal. Now another option that you might want to play with is labels and I find that a lot of users don't even realize that Adobe added labels to InDesign a couple versions ago. The easiest way to do it, especially if you're using multiple masters like I am here, do you see that A is being used throughout, except for the front matter where there's B, is to select master. Right click on it, go down to page attributes, choose color label and give it a color label.

So I'll choose maybe light blue for the A masters, and then for B I'll choose color label orange. So what happens now in the pages panel is that all the pages based on those masters get colored in concert. So I can easily see which master has been applied to which page or spread. Something that's kind of hard to do if you're just looking for these little tiny letters in the corner. By default document pages are colorized based on the master, and I don't know why this guy is not getting colorized.

But let's come right here and go to page attributes color label and give it a different color, because you can override that on the document page itself. Oh ho, that's why. I had chosen none for this page, for some reason. By default, all the document pages are set to use master color but for this one let's make it red for some reason. Another thing that I like to do with books especially is look for chapter starts and colorize the chapter starts because I'm often trying to find the beginning of chapter four or five or 15, and it's kind of hard to do.

So I'll just come here and choose page attributes color label. Let's make all these violet, there we go. So there's one chapter start, and I think this is another chapter start. Do the same thing here. Color label violet. Wish you could change the name of these, so that I could change this to chapter start, but nope. Can't do that. So a fast way to identify these pages in the pages panel is to give them a little color label. Now the last thing I want to mention is that if you want to save these settings with your pages panel, if this is how you like your pages panel to look for most of the documents that you work on, please save it in a custom work space, because otherwise the next time that you rebuild your preferences, or you choose reset for that work space that in which you were creating it, it's going to reset to the defaults, and it's going to be a pain to have to remember what you did.

So as soon as you get it looking like how you want, neaten up all of your panels, and go down to the work space menu and choose new work space. And I'm going to call it the pages panel. I usually when I customize things give it my own name, like Anne Marie or something, but for now, we'll just call it pages panel, and click OK. And now if I change to a different work space like let's say advanced, and reset that one, so it's nice and clean, you'll see that I have the default for the pages, except that the colorization is saved with the document.

But the size and the number of spreads that appear is set at the default. But if I go to pages panel and look at that same panel, there it is. There's all my settings. So there you go. Take a moment to customize your pages panel and use some of the features that are hidden in the panel menu drop down here.