Rulers and measurement units, Change rulers and measurement units – Adobe InDesign CS4 User Manual
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USING INDESIGN CS4
Layout
Rulers and measurement units
Change rulers and measurement units
You can change measurement units for the on-screen rulers and for use in panels and dialog boxes; you can also change
these settings at any time and temporarily override the current measurement units as you enter a value. By default,
rulers begin measuring from the upper-left corner of a page or spread. You can change this by moving the zero point.
(See “
Changing the measurement units doesn’t move guides, grids, and objects, so when ruler tick marks change, they might
not line up with objects aligned to the old tick marks.
Rulers in a document window
A. Labeled tick marks B. Major tick marks C. Minor tick marks
You can set up different measurement systems for horizontal and vertical rulers. The system you
select for the
horizontal ruler governs tabs, margins, indents, and other measurements. Each spread has its own vertical ruler;
however, all vertical rulers use the same settings you specify in
the Units & Increments preferences dialog box.
The default units of measure for the rulers are picas (a pica equals 12 points). However, you can change custom ruler
units and control where the major tick marks appear on a ruler. For example, if you change the custom ruler units for
the vertical ruler to 12 points, a major ruler increment appears every 12 points (if such display is possible in the current
magnification). The tick mark labels include your customized major tick marks, so when the ruler reads 3 in the same
example, it marks the third instance of the 12-point increment, or 36 points.
Vertical ruler using inches (left), and custom 12-point increments (right)
Setting custom ruler increments in the vertical ruler is useful for lining up a ruler’s major tick marks with a baseline
grid.
See also
Keys for selecting and moving objects
A
B
C
Updated 18 June 2009