So, here we are inside Adobe InDesign CS2 and if this the first time that you have opened this application, this is more than likely what you are going to see on screen. This is called the Welcome Screen and most Adobe applications have this now. It gives you access to things like new features of the program, tutorials, even extras that come on the disc and also the ability to open new documents without having to go through the standard file structure. Now, what we are going to do on here is, simply go ahead and click this button that says, Show This Dialog at Startup. So, when we select that, it turns off, so that every time you open InDesign in the future this will be deactivated. It is up to you if you want to keep that as a preference or not, but I am going to specify that for now.

Now, if I go ahead and click Close, what I am going to do is go up to the File menu and choose Open. And on the Desktop of my machine, I have the Project files for InDesign CS2, which I have copied over from the CD and I am going to go down and choose the Quick Start tool folder and inside there, there is a whole series of files that I am going to use just to create this very quick introduction to Adobe InDesign CS2.

So, I am going ahead and open up Invitation.indd., this is the file suffix for an InDesign document. Choose Invitation and click Open. Now, what you can see here is an InDesign document that is already made up. It has a couple of pages up here inside the pages palette. I have some Guides, and some Margins and Rulers, all of these things that we will go through in a short while.

Now, the first thing I am going to do is activate my Layers palette because I need to organize the structure of my layout as I go along, to make it easier to edit things throughout the process of the design. So, if I come up to the Layers palette here on the right, just select that. You can see, there is a list of layers I have all ready specified in here. Each InDesign document normally comes with just one, but I have created these already. What I am going to do is make sure I select the top layer here called Lines because I am going to create three lines that follow these Guides down the page that I have right here.

Now, if I come up here to the tool palette on the upper left-hand side, here is my Line tool, directly below the Text tool and I am just going to pull this out into the screen and somewhere on this Guide that I can see here, I am just going to click and drag and draw a line that flows pretty much down 2/3 to the page. Okay, so I can see a line that starts right here at the top and finishes down there. I am just going to back to the Main Selection tool for a second.

Now, if I used my Control palette, I can decide exactly where the line starts and finishes and also its length. So I am going to make sure that the Lines Reference Point is set to the very top here. This means that this point here is where all the measurements are taken from and then if I come here to the Y value, I can click in either direction and push this line further on or off the page, simply by doing this. Now, I have got my preferences set to millimeters at the moment, that is why it is looking the way it is and I am going to specify this to be at -3 mm on the Y axis, which means i actually sits 3 mm outside of my page and therefore would be perfectly trimmed out when this document is printed.
Now, likewise I need it to do the same of the bottom, just going to scroll up here a little bit, so I can see the bottom of the page. There is the line, we just need to bring it all the way down to the bottom and I can do that very simply by coming up to the length value here in the Control palette and just keying in an overall length of 130 mm. As soon as I key that in and say OK, you can see the line now takes up of the full length and goes 3 mm over in to my Bleed.

Now, if I just click over and deselect, what I am going to do is come down and click this icon here, which turns on a preview mode inside of InDesign. Now, when I do that, it basically gets rid of all the guides and margins and any elements on the Paste board allowing me to see my finished printed document and you can see that this line does not physically have any color attribute as yet. It is simply just a marker for a line.

So, I am going ahead and turn the preview back off, come back over and select the line, come over here to the palettes on the right-hand side of my document. You see there is a palette here called Object Styles. This is brand new inside of InDesign CS2 and I have a style I have all ready saved in here called 0.3 pt. Blank Line. If I go ahead and select that, it does a very cool thing and simply appliers a 0.3 black stroke to this line. If I now deselect it and once again turn on preview mode, I can see that that line now has color applied to it. Now, I am going to have three of these across the page. I have already one here on this guide, I need another two to take up these positions right here, very easy to do. I am just going to hold down the option key or the Alt key on the PC and simply click the line and drag it over until it snaps on to the second guideline. There, we have our second. Again, Option or Alt drag across onto the third one and we will see that snap into the guide as well. Once, again, if I deselect, turn on the preview mode, we now have three guides with which to base our design in. Now, do not forget, we are just doing this as a Quick Start tour. So all these keyboard shortcuts I am using, we are going to learn a little bit later on.