Guides

Guides are lines that can be placed in your document and help you to line up your text and images with each other. 

A blank InDesign document showing
a vertical and a horizontal guide

To set a guide click over any spot of the rulers and drag your mouse pointer over the workspace. The guide will be placed when you release the mouse button.

Move your mouse pointer to the ruler,
and click and drag to create a new guide

Horizontal guides can be made from the ruler at the top of the page. Vertical guides can be made from the ruler on the left of the page.

Guides won't print in your final document. They only appear in the InDesign document.

Why don't laser printers print to the edge of the page?

When printing a newsletter on your laser printer, you may notice that your printer will leave a white gap around the page instead of printing right to the edge.

A page printed on a printer with the white edging

Unfortunately, there is no way to force your printer to print to the edge of a page.  The reason for this is that when the paper was even slightly misaligned, parts of the image would be printed on the internals of the printer - such as the drum or rollers - rather than the paper. This would both impact the following prints and damage the printer.

If the paper was misaligned, the areas outside the black
box wouldprint on the printer roller and/or drum

What you can do?
There are three options you can pursue to tackle this problem:

• Create designs which take your printer's gap into account and don't have colour and photos to the edge of the page
• Print out your design on a page which is bigger than your design. You can then trim it down with a stanley knife and ruler to the correct size. For example, you can print your design on an A3 page and cut it down to A4.
• Similar to the above solution, if you don't have an A3 printer, you can scale your design so that it is slightly smaller than an A4 page. It will then print your entire design within the printable areas of the page and can be trimmed to size.

What is bleed and how do you use it in newsletters?

When creating a newsletter that is going to be printed by a professional printer, it's important to add bleed to your pages.

What is bleed?
Bleed is applied to any area of colour or photo which touches the edge of a page. Adding a bleed to your pages refers to extending the colour or image over the edge of the page, as show below.

In the above picture, the edge of the page is represented by the dotted line.
The areas of colour and photos have been enlarged so that they extend over the
edge of the page. This overhang is known as the bleed.

Why do newsletters need bleed?
Newsletters need bleed because of the way in which they are printed by the professional printer.

Professional printers do not work in the same way as your laser or inkjet printer. Laser and inkjet printers print on paper which has already been cut to a size - such as A4 or A3. Professional printers  print your newsletter on a huge roll of paper, and then cut it up to form each newsletter (a process known as trimming). This is illustrated below.

A roll of paper with 4 copies of the newsletter printed on it.
The black lines indicate where the roll will be cut.

The cuts made when trimming the newsletters to size do not always occur at the exact edge of the newsletter. It's not uncommon for these cuts to be up to 3mm out from where they should occur.

With and without bleed
If the trimming is slightly off and you have no bleed, your newsletter will have annoying white gaps at its edges, as shown below.

A newsletter without bleed. In the above example, the cuts are slightly
off and will be made along the black lines.

The end result. You can see the white gaps
along the top and left edges.

However, if you add bleed to your newsletter, and the trimming is slightly off, your colours and photos will still go to the edge of the page, as shown below.

A newsletter with bleed. In the above example, the cuts are slightly
off and will be made along the black lines.

The end result. Because we used a bleed, there are no white
gaps along the top and left edges.

Creating a newsletter in InDesign

Broken down to the bare essentials, creating a brochure or newsletter in InDesign is simply a matter of doing the following:

1. Create a document with the required number of pages
2. Add the necessary frames and shapes to those pages
3. Insert photos, graphics and text into the frames
4. Add colour to the shapes and frames as required
5. Styling the text

This bare essential description ignores such complexities with obtaining graphics and text, making the publication look good and preparing for print. But at its heart, creating a newsletter is a matter of following the above process.

Anatomy of an InDesign document

Pages in a document

InDesign calls whatever you create, no matter the number of pages, a Document.

Documents contain Pages.

The following items are placed on pages:

• Frames – which contain either text or graphics
• Shapes – which do not contain any thing else

Both frames and shapes can be filled with colour, and/or stroked (which means outlined).   Frames can contain Text and/or Images

Examples of frames and shapes

Finally: 

• text can be formatted 
• images can be resized and moved around in the frame.

Unformatted vs formatted text

An image moved around inside a frame

Selecting Picture and Text Frames in InDesign

The tool bar

To select a Frame to work with, choose the black arrow from the top of the tool bar - otherwise known as the Selection Tool.

A frame after a single left click.
It can now be moved around the page.

A single left click will select the frame and allow you to move it around the page.

A frame after a double left click.
You can now work with the text.

A double click will take you into the frame, allowing you to work with the contents - such as the text.

Frames - A basic InDesign building block

A crucial idea when it comes to working with InDesign is Frames. In InDesign, text and graphics are not placed directly on the page. They are placed in boxes which are called frames.

A brochure in InDesign with the frames selected

The same document broken into the frames that make it up

Frames give you the flexibility to easily change the position of the text and graphics in your document. Much more easily that in your text and graphics were directly placed on the page.