From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Changing page size and margins - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Changing page size and margins

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- [Speaker] InDesign lets you change the size of a document or adjust its margin guides after you've created it. But before you try this, you always need to ask yourself two questions. First, do you want to change just one page or all the pages in the document? And second, do you want the objects on your page to move or scale when you make that change, or do you want them to stay the same? For example, here in this magazine document, I'm going to jump to the second spread by pressing option or alt page down. Now I can change the size of a single page by choosing the page tool in the tool panel. That's the third tool down. Now, when I click on a page with a page tool, it gets these corner and side handles, which seem to let me resize it. But when you let go of the mouse button, it always snaps back to where it was. The trick here is that you need to hold down the option or alt key when you drag. That way it stays the size you choose. Or you can also use the properties panel or the control panel up here, which gives you page size features when you have the page tool selected. Like for example, I could set the reference point to the lower left corner, which means lock that point and resize the page from there. And then I'll come over to this popup menu and choose, say the A four page size. Now just this one page is set to A four. Of course, it's rare that you'd need to have different sized pages inside a document, but there are situations where it's super helpful. You just need to be careful with this feature. Okay, if I want to change the margins, I would need to make sure this page is selected inside the pages panel. So I'll open that and I can see that I have two pages selected. So I'm going to deselect by clicking out here in the blank area, and then just clicking once on that page. Now I'll go to the layout menu and choose margins and columns. This lets me change my margin and column guides for whatever page or pages are selected in the pages panel. But look down here, see this checkbox called adjust layout? That's how you tell InDesign whether or not you want it to change the objects on the page. If you turn that on, then InDesign will try its best to scale or adjust the layout to fit your new size. I'm going to leave this off for right now, and I'll change the bottom margin to something a bit bigger, say 150 points. Then I'll press tab. I have the preview checkbox turned on in this dialogue box, and I'll move this out of the way, and then you can see down here that the margin changed, but the objects on the page stayed where they were. Okay, now if I turn on adjust layout, you can see that the text frame is resized too. InDesign sees that the bottom of that frame should be aligned with the margin guide. Here, I'll use the preview checkbox to show me before and after. Note that it's moving not just the text frame, but the image moved too, and that's because InDesign is doing its best to maintain the general layout of the page. Okay, this is a kind of crazy thing to do for this particular document. So I'll click cancel, and then I'll undo those changes to go back to the way it was. Now in this case, I actually want to change all the pages of the document, not just one. This magazine is a non-standard size, and let's say I've been asked by my boss to resize it to fit onto a regular U.S. letter-sized page. To do that, I'm going to head to the file menu. Now, if I don't want InDesign to move or resize my page objects, I'll just use document setup. You can see that this feature lets me change all sorts of things about my file, including whether or not this should be a Facing Pages document, what the first page should be numbered, and down here, the page size. Like if I change this to a letter size page, it'll change the whole document and it will leave all the text frames and the graphic frames alone. It basically just centers them onto the new spread size. Let me show you a better example. I'm going to choose a really big page size, like A three, and I'll turn on the preview checkbox. When I move this out of the way, you can see I get the big page sizes and all the objects are simply centered on the spread. Oh, by the way, this changes every page in the file, including your parent pages. So again, document setup is great when you do not want to change your page objects, but in this case, I do. So I'm going to cancel that and I'll head back to the file menu, and this time I want to use adjust layout instead. Adjust layout is a really cool feature that makes semi-intelligent guesses about how you probably want to move stuff around or resize it in order to fit a new page size. Now, it's important to know this is not perfect. Sometimes it makes crazy mistakes. So you should plan on doing some manual cleanup afterward. But this feature is really good at getting you at least halfway there. For example, let's go ahead and choose the letter size page. Down here you'll see a checkbox that lets you tell InDesign if you want it to resize the text too, and that's helpful if you're making a really big change, like taking a large ad and shrinking it down to be a small one. But in this case, I'm going to leave that turned off and I'll just click, okay. That actually did a pretty good job here. Let's refit the spread in the window with a command option or a control alt zero. And I do notice that the text got cut off in this text frame over here, which makes sense because the frames got a little smaller. So again, I would have to do some manual cleanup to adjust the layout accordingly. The important thing is that in just a few clicks, I've resized every page of this document. Doing that all manually would've taken a long time. So this adjust layout feature is such a relief.

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