InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 6. Creating Layout Standards

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Automating repetitive tasks

• Working with master pages

• Creating templates

• Using libraries

• Ensuring consistency with rulers, grids, and guides

Think for a moment about the publications you produce. Chances are that most of your work involves creating multiple iterations of a basic set of publications, and each publication looks more or less the same from issue to issue. For example, periodicals such as newsletters, magazines, and newspapers don't change much from one issue to the next (disregarding the occasional redesigns that all publications undergo). The ongoing uniformity of such things as page size, margins, page layouts, text formats, even the tone of the writing, gives each publication a unique look and feel.

If you had to start from scratch every time you created a publication, you'd spend the bulk of your time setting up your documents and have little time left to attend to the appearance of the content (you'd probably get terribly bored, too). Few things are less rewarding than doing the same job over and over. Fortunately, InDesign includes several extremely useful features that let you automate repetitive tasks. This chapter focuses on three of them: master pages, templates, and libraries.

• A master page is a preconstructed page layout that you can use when adding pages to a multipage document. With master pages, you can design a single background page and then use it as the basis for as many document pages as you want. Without ...