From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Aligning and distributing - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Aligning and distributing

“

- [Instructor] One of the signs of professional design is the precision and consistency of how you align your objects on the page. So let's take a look at some great tricks for ensuring your objects line up. First, let's open the Pages panel and jump down here to page five, just by double-clicking on it. We have three images on this page that I want to align. Now, as you drag one of these, you'll notice these little lines show up and then disappear. Those are Smart Guides, and they make life so much easier. Like I'm going to drag this until we see this magenta line appear. The magenta lines mean it's centered on the page. If I drag it farther up, you can see a green line appear. The green line along the top of those objects means that those two image frames are aligned. Now, check this out. Let's drag this other object on the right until it aligns with the others. And if you look carefully, you can see two little double-headed green arrows show up right along the bottom. Those arrows mean that the spaces between the objects are also equal. That is super helpful. Smart Guides are great for aligning two or three things, but if you have a lot of objects to align, it is much easier to use the Align panel. For example, let's go ahead and mess these up again. And I'll close the Pages panel. Now, I'll select all three of them by dragging over it with a selection tool. I'll go to the Window menu, look inside Object & Layout, and then choose Align. I'll move this off to the side so we can see what we're doing better. Okay, I can align all of these along their top edges by clicking on this align top button. And I should point out that some of these align features also live in the Control Panel if your screen is wide enough, and you can find them in the Properties panel too. So one click and they're all aligned. Next, to distribute the space between them equally so that we have the same amount of space between each one, you can click on the Distribute Spacing horizontally button. Notice that I'm not using the Distribute Objects buttons. A lot of people make that mistake. You want to use Distribute Spacing because that means make sure there's an equal amount of space between each object. When you do that, the left and right objects remain exactly where they are and the other objects move so that we have equal space between them. Now, on the other hand, sometimes it's helpful to specify an exact amount of space that you want between objects. For example, maybe you want, say, two millimeters between each of these images. To do that, you need to turn on the Use Spacing checkbox down at the bottom of the panel. Then, type in the value you want here. I'll type two millimeters. Now when I click the Distribute Spacing button, it gives me exactly two millimeters between each object. I love that kind of precision. Okay, here's one more alignment trick that I need to show you. I'm going to mess these up one more time. Now, let's select all of those objects, and this time, I want to align to the bottom edge of this one, the one in the middle. So I'll turn off Use Spacing down here. And I might as well distribute these evenly. That looks better. But if I want them all to align to the bottom edge, you'd think that you could just click the align bottom edges button here. But that won't work. That would align to the bottom edge of this one down here at the bottom of the page. Because the align bottom button always aligns to the bottom-most object in the selected group, just like align left always aligns to the leftmost object and so on. In this case, I want it to align to this one in the middle. So to make it align on that one, you need to do one more thing before you click that button. You need to click the object. When you do that, it highlights it with a heavy outline. That's called making it the key object, and all the other ones will align to it. In fact, if you look closely, here inside the Align panel, there's an Align To pop-up menu. This lets you tell InDesign what you want to align to, the margins, the page, or in this case, the key object. So now I'll click the align bottom button and you'll see that all three of those objects are now aligned along the bottom edge of the key object. Now, because I have these aligned just right and I don't want to move one without the others, I'm going to group them. So I make sure all three are selected. I'll go to the Object menu and choose Group. Of you could press cmd + g on the Mac or ctrl + g on Windows. You can always tell a group on your page because it has a dashed line around the whole thing. And if you drag one of those objects, the other ones move too. In fact, InDesign actually treats this group as a single object. However, if you need to change one of them, it's easy. Just double-click on it. That isolates that object so you can edit it. For example, I'll just move this up a little bit. Then, when you're done, just click off of it and you'll see that this is still a group. It still has those dashed lines. Now, grouping is great, but it does come with one limitation that you should know about. All the objects in a group have to be on the same layer. If they're not on the same layer, grouping them will actually put them on the same layer. I love InDesign because it gives me incredibly precise control over every object on my page, which is exactly what I need to build high-quality documents.

Contents