Rotating objects

- Having your objects straight up and down on the page is no fun. Let's learn how to rotate them. I'm gonna rotate this image here. So I'll select it on my page and zoom in to 200% by pressing cmd 2 on the Mac or ctrl 2 on Windows. The easiest way to rotate this image is to come up here to the control panel and click on one of these two rotation arrows. When I click the right one, it rotates it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Click on the left one, and it rotates it back. Now if I want to rotate this in more fine increments, I'll move to the left just a little bit and change the rotation field.

There's a little pop-up menu here, and I can choose a rotation out of that if I want. For example, I'll choose minus 45. Negative numbers rotate clockwise. Positive rotate counterclockwise. Let's change this to something else. Instead of pulling a number out of the pop-up menu, I'll simply change the number here to, say, 25 degrees. Hit Enter or Return, and it's rotated. But there's an important question here. Why is this rotating around the upper left corner of this object? Why wasn't it rotating around the center or some other point? Well, the answer to that can be found on the far left side of the control panel in what's called the reference point.

The reference point tells InDesign where the anchor should be. So I'll set the rotation back to zero, and now we can see over in the reference point that the upper left corner has been selected. If I click in the center of the reference point instead, and now rotate to something like 25 degrees, you'll see it rotates around the center of that object. Now, if you like working more interactively rather than typing numbers in, you can also move your cursor just outside one of the corners of any selected object. When you do that, the cursor changes to a double headed arrow.

That's the indication that I'm now going to start rotating this. Once again, as I drag, it's rotating around the center of this object because that's where the reference point was. If you squint, you'll notice a little indicator just to the right of the cursor that shows me what the angle currently is. Now, if you want even more control over how you rotate objects, you could use the rotation tool. You can find that down here in the tool panel hiding underneath the Free Transform Tool. You'll see, I just click and hold for a moment, up comes this pop-up menu, and now I can choose the Rotate Tool.

Now if you really squint, you'll notice right in the middle of the object, there's a tiny little crosshair. That crosshair reflects the reference point that was up in the control panel, but with the rotation tool, I can put this anywhere I want just by clicking. For example, I'm just going to click on this little point at the top of the globe. When I click, the crosshair moves there. Now I can click and drag anywhere on my page to rotate around that point. Once again, the cursor indicates what the current angle is as I'm dragging.

So now that we know how to rotate objects, the obvious question is how can we scale them bigger or smaller? And that's what I'll cover in the next movie.