InDesign Tutorial
by Jon Shan

Your
Workspace

The Menu
• File: Save (⌘+S), Print (⌘+P), Place (⌘+D)
• Edit: Undo (⌘+Z), Cut, Copy, Paste (⌘+X,C,V)
• Layout: Margin and Columns… Ruler Guides…
• Type: Character Styles, Insert Special Character
• Object: Transform, Display Performance (individual)
• View: Display Performance, Hide Rulers (⌘+R)

The Toolbox
V
A

Selecting and Clicking Stuff
Selection Direct Selection
• Black arrow • White arrow
• Objects and their box • Content within a Frame
– Frames – Moving pictures
– Pictures without frames – Resizing or skewing pictures
• Shortcut: V • Shortcut: A

Using Frames

Creating a Text Frame

Frame Fitting for Photos

Margins and Columns

Guides

Spellcheck

Importing Your Stuff
rop
+
D
Note: If you drop your files and pictures, you don’t need
to create text and graphic frames. If you already created
text and graphic frames, you can drop your files into
those.

Paragraph Styles

The Campanile
MANIPULATING
PHOTOS AND OBJECTS

Photos: Mirroring
The
subject
faces
inward
towards
the
text

Photos: Scaling
Original NO! NO!
Doing it proportionally
•Select the photo
•Hold Shift key down
•Drag photo from corner
YES!

Display Performance
(why photos may look blocky)
Fast Display
Image is grayed out to max performance
Typical Display (Default)
Image is pixelated to speed
zooming performance.
Similar to a thumbnail photo.
High Quality Display
Displays the original, accurate
image, but slows InDesign.

If your toolbars are missing items

InDesign Shortcuts
• Drop +D Bold + Shift + B
• Save +S Italics + Shift + I
• Undo +Z Normal + Shift + Y
• Redo + Shift+Z
• Spell-check +I Zoom in +
Zoom out -
To scale pictures
Fit to Window 0
proportionally, hold “shift”
Switch Windows ~
and drag a corner.

The Campanile
FREE TOOLS
FOR HOME USE

Instead of Word, Powerpoint, Excel…
Google Docs
Buzzword
Open Office
Instead of Photoshop…
GIMP
Paint.NET
Resize your photos
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu
http://rsizr.com
IntuImage