Working with master pages

- [Instructor] In the previous movie, we created a four-page document and we zeroed out the margins. We're going to change them now on the master pages, which is where you do them if you want them to run throughout a document after you've created it. There are three ways that I can think of to get to the master pages, the first of which is down at the bottom of the interface here. This is the current page indicator, and you can see it just there. You can also go to the Pages panel, and you can see at the top here, the master pages above this dividing line.

But the way I'd really like you to do it is to learn the jump to page shortcut, which is Cmd, or Ctrl if you're on a Windows machine, and tap J for jump. I know it's the Go to Page dialogue, but let's think of it as jumping there. All you then need to do is tap A and hit Return, and hey presto, you are now on the master pages. Now, we can view the whole spread here by either going to the View menu or using Alt + Cmd + 0. That's Alt + Ctrl + 0 on a PC.

Now, we're going to use type here to establish a baseline grid, and also, the page margins. To do this, we're going to do a few things. We're going to introduce a temporary text box, and we're going to start at the top left-hand corner and make our way down to the center of the spread, like so. Now, our cursor will be blinking away in the top there, and what we could do is actually populate this with body text. That would be helpful.

The character options should be showing now in the control strip. If you're seeing the paragraph options, simply click the A there to go through, and we're going to type Kinesis, because the typeface we introduced last time, unless you're using one of your own, and then just apply that, and change the value of the size here down to 10. We're going to do 10 on 12. At the moment, it says 12 in there, but because it's in parentheses, that means it's automatic, so we're going to override it and force it to be actually 12, because they don't go very well with baseline grids, automatic settings.

Once you've done that, go to the Type menu, and right the way down to the bottom, bar one, and hit Fill with Placeholder Text, and then we've just got some text in there for the moment. It's only here temporarily, just to help us out a little bit, and so what we're going to do next is hit the Escape key on our keyboard. That takes us out of the text, picks up the selection tool, and returns the control strip to things about measurement, so it's giving us units here in millimeters at the moment, or whatever unit you're in.

I want to switch this across to something that relates to the text, and that would be picas, so I'm going to go to the zero point here. That's where the rulers meet at the top left of the document window. Right-click and choose Picas, because we've got an interlinear space of 12 points, which, of course, is one pica, so now we can use these measurements to do some things for us. We can see here that the page is 49 picas 7.276 wide, and it's 35 picas 0.945 high.

I'm just going to keep hold of that 945, in fact, I'm actually going to select it and copy it, Cmd + C or Ctrl + C. Once I've done that, I'm going to go up to the Layout menu and come down to Margins and Columns, and making sure that these things are unchecked... At the moment, it says they're not, which is just great. I'm going to type "3p" in the top field just there, and then Tab through to the next field. Here, I'm going to do 4p, and then I'm going to paste down that value, 'cause it's going to take up the slack from the remainder of the irregular measurement.

Then I can do the inside here, so the inside, I'm going to set to be the same as the top, so I'm just going to do 3 picas there, so 3p, and the outside, more or less the same as the bottom. I'm just going to do 4 picas just there, so a more generous thumb width on the outside and the inside, because this is only a single-fold sheet with just one sheet of paper, then that's just fine. For columns here, I'm going to introduce six. There are many, many different ways of working with columns, and in fact, I urge you to watch my good friend Nigel French's title on using grids inside of InDesign for much more information on that.

The gutter, I'm going to leave that the same as the leading, one pica, like so, and hit OK, so my grid's there right now. If I wanted to, if I really, really thought it was important, what I could do is actually take that width and set the outside width to be exactly the same, as well, but I'm not really overly fussed about that at this particular time. I'm going to delete that text frame, it's done its job, and all I'm going to do now is add some guides so I've just got some idea of the spacing of the page.

Once again, that's up to the Layout menu, and this time, down to Create Guides. Here, I'm just going to introduce four rows, like so, and make sure that they're set between the margins. The columns, I've already got, and then hit OK. That's it, my guides are established. Let's just do the baseline grid. This happens up in the InDesign menu on the Macintosh, down to Preferences, the Edit menu in Preferences on the PC, and then come down to Grids.

What we're going to do here is we're going to set the baseline grid. We're going to set the start to three picas from the top of the page, because that matches our measurement here. Increment every 12 points, and hit OK. Now, you won't be able to see it at the moment. If you want to see it, it's available in the application bar, just here. This is on the right-hand side, by the way, on the PC, you can turn on baseline grid, and then we've got those ruled lines across there. The actual guides, they don't match up to these. They should really if you are doing a proper grid layout, so they're just there to give us a vague idea of where things are in the layout, or a slightly more informed idea, perhaps I should say.

Just going to turn the baseline grid off, then we'll go back to page one, Cmd + J, 1, Return. There we are, back on page one. We've got our grid. Let's start adding content in the next movie.