Adobe InDesign CS2 - Setting up Rulers

Learn How to set up Rulers in InDesign

So, now that we have the entire spread fit in the window, let us take a look at Guides. Now, this is one of my favorite features inside of InDesign for laying out things very accurately and very precisely for your layout. Now, the Guides are normally, created from the Rulers and most programs work exactly the same way. You have a ruler bar that goes across the top of your document and down the left hand side and there are a couple of things to bear in mind on this. If we just have a look up here in the upper left hand side of it, the first thing to point out is what is called the zero lock and you can see here that the zero for the X axis and the zero for the Y axis all start from the very upper left hand side of this page. Now, this zero lock can be move around simply by clicking in here and dragging it to a different location, so maybe you want it to start here on the corner of the first column. As soon as you let go, you see the zeros now measures from this point in. Now, this is can be use to position things very precisely on different parts of the page. What we can do for now, though, is just double click back inside the zero lock to reset it back to the upper left hand side because this also highlights something quite important when doing spread work out. We scroll the page across a little bit, so we can see the joining down the middle. We can see that the value of the ruler across the top continues all the way across the spine and finishes over here on the right hand side of the second page. Well, if we are trying to position something on this page, maybe 15 mm from the left hand side, we would need to know exactly what this value is here and it is around about 152.5 mm. That does not really help. It will be nice to have the zero reset itself, so, it goes from the upper left hand side of the first page to the right hand side of the first page and starts again from zero and goes all the way to this side. Well, this is done inside our preferences. So, just like we did earlier on, let us press Ctrl K or Command K on the Mac to bring up the preferences dialog. What we will do is come to Units and Increments. This is where we specified all of the options for our millimeters or inches values and here we can say the origin is set to spread and that is what we are seeing, the zero is measuring across the entire spread. To choose that, go down and select “Page”. That will simply do it on a page by page basis. If you now, hit “Return” or “Enter” to apply that, you can see that the zero is now reset here at the center of the spine. We have a whole new set of measurements we can work on the right hand side with. Now, bear in mind that change we just made is in this document only. If we close this document down, we will reset back to the original spread settings. If you want that applied on a permanent basis, do it with no document open. Now, another thing I have briefly pointed out earlier on is how we can change in a context-sensitive way the values that we see here inside the rulers. If we right click or Ctrl click on the Mac inside one of these rulers, we can specify this ruler to show us different values at any one time. So, let us say, at the moment, we are viewing millimeters, we could say inches across the top ruler, but you see the left hand one if you right click or Ctrl click on that as well. It is still set to millimeters. So, this allows you to be a little bit more flexible with positioning things based on measurements that maybe someone has given you and not the measurements that you are currently working with. I am going ahead and set that back to millimeters, but just so you know it is there, you do not have to go through your preferences to do that every single time. You can literally do that and apply whenever you need it.