Book layout with Indesign

I started learning Indesign to lay out books. Coming from the MS Word paradigm ("Let's just start typing"), Indesign was intimidating. You can't just paste a blob of text into an "Indesign document". You set up master pages, you flow text between frames, you create paragraph styles. In a few sessions, I fell in love! When you set everything up correctly, Indesign is so simple. It would take me wayyy longer to do the same things in MS Word---though for the most part, I can't do the same things! Indesign is a precision tool to get a book looking Swiss-clean.

As problems arise and I learn their solutions, I add them to this page. I am still no expert. I use Indesign CS3 but I'd guess these tips also work in CS4.

Margins

How to change margins? This was a mystery to me until I realized that you need to turn on a switch and adjust margins at the master level.
First turn on the switch: Layout / Layout Adjustment, check "Enable".
Select the master page to which you want the margins to apply (as high in the hierarchy as you can go).
Go Layout -> Margins and adjust the numbers.

What are the best margins? I read about the canons of page layout, but the ratios from the Middle Ages don't work for me. After a lot of reading, I settled on this for a 6x9 book:
Inside: 0.9 inch. I don't like to have to bend a book to read the text closest to the gutter.
Outside: 0.9 inch. If I go any wider, my lines become too short for the 12-point type I'm using.
Top: 0.75. This gives a 1.2 ratio (one plus one fifth) with the inside and outside margins. Apparently our eyes like such ratios. Bottom: 1.2135 inch. This gives us the "golden ratio" between the top and bottom margin (1.6180399). Apparently our eyes like this.

What are the best justification settings?

After a lot of digging around on what professional book designers consider acceptable, I adopted the settings below. They work well on a book page in 12-point Sabon, and presumably in other types and sizes. Note that some people frown on ever using glyph scaling, but at that percentage I appreciate the extra kick it gives me in producing clean, consistently justified paragraphs.

Here are the numbers for the Minimum, Desired and Maximum boxes:
Word Spacing: 90 / 100 / 110
Letter Spacing: -5 / 0 / 5
Glyph Scaling: -98 / 100 / 102

How to align the bottom lines of pages

When the bottom lines of pages don't align, spreads don't look so good. There are two main ways to fix this: vertical justification, and working with baselines. In a book, it's probably not a good idea to use vertical justify. The first and last lines will be even but those in between will be all over the page.

To start working with baselines, show the grid: View, Grids & Guides, Show baseline grid.

Set your baseline: Edit / Preferences / Grid, Increment every: enter the same as your normal leading.

Here's a first option, not for the faint of heart: Select all the text. Select Window / Type & Tables / Paragraph, click the bottom right icon ("Align to baseline grid"). This will work, but it will align everything, not just the body text but also headings and so on.
Much preferable is to set the styles you want to align to the baseline. Double click each style you want to align to the grid. Choose "Indents and Spacing", set Align to Grid to "All lines".
You will probably want to do this for all your style, except perhaps chapter headings. If you use the "Space After" setting for any of your styles (Paragraph Style / Indents and Spacing), you will want to set it either to zero, to your leading or to a multiple of your leading. Otherwise, the grid alignment may force the next paragraph further down when you want it to be.

If you have more great ideas on this topic, please write!

Page numbers (folios) in indesign

1 Adding numbers. Create a new master page that is based on a plain master page (a page without numbers). Keep the unnembered master page, you will also use it. On the new master page, create text boxes where you want the numbers to appear. Inside the box, select Type/Insert Special Character/Markers/Current page number. Apply the master to all pages where you want to appear: In the Pages view, drag the numbered master page onto the icon of the pages that should have number.

2 Removing numbers. When you don't want numbers on a certain page, apply an un-numbered master to that page (in pages view, drag the un-numbered master onto the icon of the page that will not have numbers).

3 Formatting numbers. Create a paragraph style for your right page number. Call it page-R. Align it to the right. Create a paragraph style based on page-R and call it page-L. Align it to the left. Open your numbered master page, apply the page-L and page-R styles to the numbers.

4 Getting numbers to start on page 9. Let's say the first pages are just front matter (copyright and title stuff) and you don't want them to count in your numbering. Place yourself on the first page that you want to count. Select Layout/Numbering and Section options. Check "Start new section", choose to start numbering at 1 (if you don't want "1" to appear or page one, see "Removing numbers" above), choose a style ("1 2 3" vs "i ii iii"), click OK.

Avoiding the lone "I" character at the end of lines

I was working with a 200-page documents with left-justified text in paragraph composer. Many lines ended with a stray "I" character; it was unsightly. The solution is to insert a non-breaking white space after the "I". This is also useful to prevent the "A" that starts a sentence from ending up at the end of a line, ot to avoid stray digits at the end of lines, as happens if "63 men" is broken up.

Here is the procedure for a global replace. Make a copy of your document before you try this! First find one instance of the lone I. Delete the space after it. Now go Type / Insert White Space / Nonbreaking space. Now copy the "I" together with the space before it and the non-breaking space. Press Ctrl+F, type " I " in the "Find what" box (space + I + space), paste your correct I-sequence in the "Change to" box, choose "Document" in the Search pull-down, click Change All.

How to prevent a word from breaking

Sometimes there's a word or string of characters you want to keep together, like "5€/kg", but the paragraph composer insists on hypenating it. Select the word. On the right side, in the tools palette, navigate to the Characters palette. Choose the tiny downward arrow on the top right (the Character menu), and choose "No break".

How to use phonetic characters that are not in your font

I looked everywhere for a font with phonetic characters, but all those I tried lacked the one I wanted (for the vowel sound in the French word "pain"). The solution was beautiful. Get a copy of FontCreator. Open your font (if it's a True-Type font and the designer allows you to do so). Add a glyph, copying pieces of other glyphs.

How to work with a grey screen

After a days of work editing a book, the white paper and pasteboard just kills my eyes. By hitting W (once you're out of text mode), you shift to preview mode, which has a gray background. This grey can be adjusted in Edit / Preference / Guides & Pasteboard.

To change the on-screen color of the pages, click on Swatches, double-click paper, and choose a Black value somewhere around 10%, leaving the other colors at zero. The print output won't be affected.

Image display quality

If your images look bad on the document, you're probably in the typical display mode, rather than the high quality display mode. You can change that either globally in the View / Display performance menu (Alt+Ctrl+H), or image-by-image by right-clicking the image and choosing the right display performance at the bottom of the menu.

Shortcuts

Toggle the view between Normal and Preview: W (press Ctrl+Shift+A first if you are in text mode)
Toggle the view between Normal Text and Story: Ctrl+Y (press Ctrl+Shift+A first if you are in text mode)
Place: Ctrl + D
Page Break: Ctrl + Enter from the Numeric keypad
Autoflow text: After clicking the out port, Shift+Click on the next page where text should flow
Em-dash: Alt + Shift + the minus / underscore key

Until I learn which shortcuts are actually useful for me, as a placeholder, here's a list of Indesign shortcuts from a wonderful blog.

Warm regards,

Andy

Indesign Links

Creative Curio has Indesign tutorials. I got started with Lauren Marie's tutorials. She saved me a lot of time because she insists on setting up paragraph styles and explains the workflow at the start of a project.

Indesign tips at Peachpit. Great tips on this sample book chapter.

Indesign forum at Creative cow. Questions get answered there.

Smiles,

Andy

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