Adobe InDesign: Working with New Documents

Name: Adobe InDesign: Working with New Documents
Author: Patti Scully-Lane

Gone are the days when you needed a dedicated team of professional typesetters and pressmen to prepare a poster, brochure, magazine, or newspaper for print. We…

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Course: On-Demand

In this lesson you are going to learn how to create a new document in Adobe InDesign. With Adobe products, there are a couple different ways to do the exact same task. I'm gonna show you a couple different ways that you can create a new document in InDesign. First way would be just to click on the create new button from your home screen and that would bring up your dialogue box, your new document dialogue box. Another way that you could do it would be to go to the file menu, to new, document. Now you will notice when you do that, that Ctrl+N is the keyboard shortcut, Cmd+N if you are on a Mac. Now when you go to the new document dialogue box there are tabs up across the top that we can look through. The first is the recent tab, and this is where we have all of the files that I have created recently. There is a saved tab for any of the saved presets that you may have created. Then there is a print tab, a web tab, and a mobile tab depending upon the size of file that you are creating and what type of file you are creating for, whether it is for a print document, something that will be out on the web or something that you will be viewing on a mobile device. So for right now, we're gonna go back to the print tab and we're gonna choose letter from the blank document presets. When we choose letter, over to the right, here are our preset details. Here's the width and the height and you can see that currently it is in Picas. If I click on this dropdown menu we can switch over to inches which is sometimes a little bit easier for people to use. Now, in the orientation, we can choose whether or not our document is portrait or landscape just by clicking on the button. We can also choose whether or not we have facing pages for our document and the number of pages that we're putting into our document. If I decide that I want to do a four page newsletter we can just select that number one and type four over it to create a four page document. In the columns area we can choose how many column guides we have in our document. And then down at the bottom we can change the margins of our document. This says how far from the edge of the page, the margin will be so that we make sure we don't put anything too close to the edge so that it might get cut off when we print. Now, when you have the details set for your preset you can just click on the create button and InDesign will create a new document for you. And over here, on the right, if you can't see your pages panel, if you're in your properties, you can click on the pages panel at the top, and you can see that we have created a new four page document in Adobe InDesign. So in this document you learned how to create a new document in Adobe InDesign.

Beginner Provider : Patti Scully-Lane 7 Lessons · 30m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

Gone are the days when you needed a dedicated team of professional typesetters and pressmen to prepare a poster, brochure, magazine, or newspaper for print. We have dedicated apps for all that now, but none quite so prominent as Adobe InDesign, which has come to dominate the desktop publishing industry, making it an essential tool for modern-day communication. In this Beginner Adobe InDesign course, you will learn the basics of working with InDesign and how it fits in with the Creative Cloud desktop app. From there, you will learn how to open existing documents and create new documents from scratch using Adobe’s templates. Then you will progress to adding text and graphics to the page, as well as exploring and applying basic character and paragraph formatting, including a primer on working with Adobe fonts. You will understand how to analyze graphics to determine if they are vector or raster, RGB or CMYK, and if they have the correct resolution for your output. Finally, you will both link and embed graphics to figure out which is best for your situation; then you will see how to crop and modify those graphics to better fit your available page space.

In these lessons, you will learn how to create and work with new documents, from working off document templates to building new documents from scratch using margins, columns, and guides. You’ll also learn to manipulate pages with color swatches, and increase document workflow by setting master pages.

What You'll Learn

Create new InDesign documents from scratch and build documents from Adobe templates
Set up document structure using margins, columns, and guides
Add text and graphics to the page and apply basic character and paragraph formatting
Analyze graphics to determine whether they are vector or raster, RGB or CMYK, and correctly resolved for output
Link and embed graphics, then crop and modify them to fit available page space
Create and apply master pages and work with color swatches to streamline document workflow

Key Takeaways

Adobe InDesign is the dominant desktop publishing tool for preparing posters, brochures, magazines, and newspapers for print.
InDesign documents can be created either from Adobe's templates or built from scratch using margins, columns, and guides.
Graphics can be both linked and embedded in InDesign, and the course covers determining which approach is best for a given situation.
Master pages and color swatches help increase document workflow and manage pages consistently.
The course covers saving work in both InDesign and IDML file formats.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is this course for?

This is a beginner Adobe InDesign course covering the basics of working with InDesign and how it fits in with the Creative Cloud desktop app.

What will I learn to do with documents?

You will learn to create new documents, build documents from a template, and edit documents with formatting adjustments, including working with margins, columns, guides, color swatches, and master pages.

What topics does the course cover for working with graphics?

It covers adding graphics to the page, analyzing whether graphics are vector or raster and RGB or CMYK, checking resolution for output, linking versus embedding graphics, and cropping and modifying graphics to fit the page.

What skills does this course build?

It builds skills in Adobe InDesign, document formatting, document management, document production, drafting documents, and works toward Adobe InDesign certification.

What lessons are included?

Lessons include Creating a New Document, Creating from an Adobe Template, Adding Margins and Columns, Working with Guides, RGB vs CMYK and Swatches, Creating and Applying Master Pages, and Saving InDesign and IDML Files.