Okay, we are going to begin this lesson by having to look at the options inside the new File dialogue box. We can access that very easily by pressing command N or CTRL N on the PC and most of the options inside here are fairly straight forward. What we have is an initial choice of the number of pages. I am just really going to start out with one for now.

We have an option to turn Facing Pages on or off. So, if you are simply just working on a single document or you are may be needing pages to be completely separate from each other without joining in the spine like a book would, then you can turn off Facing Pages, about 9 times out of 10, it will work with that set.

You also have an option of a Master Text Frame being applied to every single page. Again, it is up to you if you feel the need to have that. I am actually going to show you some different options for using text frames when importing large amounts of copy from another program such as Word in which case that can be come quite handy.

Now, we also have the options of preset sizes here for the Page Sizes. So, it is standard US and European sizes, as well as the option to key in our own in here. Now, this is where we highlight the function of the millimeters versus inches versus pica setting that we looked up a little while ago. We changed our preferences to millimeters or maybe you have yours still set to inches and I did mention that it does not matter what we specify here, InDesign can convert this value for us. Well, at the moment, I have got a document size of letter which is approximately 216 mm wide by nearly 280 deep. Let us say, I want to design a file that is exactly 5 in2, so it is going to be a small postcard maybe. I do not have to figure out what the value is in mm to do that, I can simply type in 5 in and if I hit the TAB key, jump across to the next dialogue, you see it will convert it immediately to the mm value. Now, we can also do another measurement for that. We could say 5 and use a double quotation mark which is the standard symbol for inches. Again, if I hit the Tab key, you see that it also converted to the same mm value. Now, this can be applied in any form or whatsoever. Let us say we need a height of 12 picas and 1 point, we can simply say 12p1, hit the Tab key and that is also then converted to a standard mm function. So, like I said at the beginning, it does not matter what your preferences are set to. You can customize it on the fly, simply by keying in a small addition to the value. Now, I am just going to set this back to what I know is 5 in2, just by the given information above, let us say 127 mm. I can then specify the number of columns and the gutter. And we will use this throughout the training as well, but for now, just leave this set to 1.

Now, towards the bottom, we have an important section for the margins which defines the area at the top or the bottom, the inside or the outside of the document, and if you go up and turn off the Facing Pages, you will see that the inside and outside changes to left and right. So, again, if these pages are just going to be set on its own, then you would have a left and right value, but the Facing Pages knows that this could be a left or right Facing Page and therefore, you have an inside or an outside measurement. Now, one thing that is handy in here is this link icon, which allows us to specify one value for a margin and have all the others appear the same. You go ahead and turn that on. Let us maybe select this first item and say, 10 mm all the way around and hit the Tab key, you will see that all of the other values changed as well.

And there are more things that we can do this at the same time. There is a button up here on the right hand side that says More Options. If you go ahead and select that, what it does is actually activate a portion lower than what we are seeing right here. You have a Bleed and Slug section at the bottom of the window now. You can see that the Bleed value kind of hinted at this earlier on when I was showing you the Quick Start Tool, this red line that appears around the outside of the document. This allows us to bleed our graphics over the edge, so that we can guarantee edge to edge color when the document is trimmed down. Likewise, this has a link setting also, so we can turn that own and maybe specify something like 5 mm for the first value, hit the Tab key and that will be applied again all the way around. And then the Slug is actually an area that appears anywhere around the outside of the document that can contain print information such as the designers that work on it, the colors that will be used, the date it was created, any information specifically for the printer such as the line screen that is going to be used to output the document. That can be contained in an area normally just at the bottom, so you may want to specify a bottom area of maybe 25 mm which is approximately an inch. But in case, I probably would not specify Slug all the way around unless there were very specific things I needed to do around all four sides of the document.