InDesign Document Area

If you need to measure things on your screen put that plastic ruler back in your drawer right now ... InDesign has rulers which are located right on the top and on the left of the document's window. You have the horizontal ruler (x axis) and the vertical ruler (y axis). They they can help you to measure what you see on screen. If you don't see them you just need to go to View > Show Rules. If you don't want to see them but they are turned on, you go to View > Hide Rules (or press F7 to turn them on or off).

The origin of rules can be changed. There are different ways to do this: Go to the top left corner of your work area where the rules start. Now click on it with your mouse and drag diagonally towards the right. When you release the mouse button, you will see that your 0, or origin of the rules, will be where you released the mouse. To reset your rules as they were before, just double click on the top left corner. Go to InDesign > Preferences (Mac OS) or Edit > Preferences (Windows) and select Units & Increments. Look at the section Ruler Units. You will see that there is a setting called Origin. You can choose between Page, Spread or Spine. While the Page and Spread option are quite obvious, the Spine option isn't really descriptive. The spine is the point where you would be binding your pages. In actual fact Adobe calls it Binding Spine.

Continue to the next page for more on the Ruler Origin and Binding Spine.

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