In InDesign, you can create a new file by pressing Command/Control-N.

In InDesign, you can create a new file by pressing Command/Control-N

If you’re designing for a printer that can only run letter-size paper, you have to allow enough of a margin area for your printer to hold the paper as it moves through the device, called the gripper margin.

A slug is an element entirely outside the page area, but included in the final output.

A preset stores groups of common settings; you define a preset once, and then you can access the same group of settings later with a single click.

The live area is the “safe” area inside the page edge, where important design elements should reside.

Vector graphics are composed of mathematical descriptions of a series of lines and shapes. They are automatically output at the resolution of the output device.

Raster images, such as photographs or files created in Adobe Photoshop, are made up of a grid of independent pixels in rows and columns (called a bitmap).

The screens used with old graphic-arts cameras had a finite number of available dots in a horizontal or vertical inch. That number was the screen ruling, or lines per inch of the halftone.

As a general rule for preparing commercial print layouts, most raster images should have twice the pixel resolution (at 100% size) as the line screen that will be used.

Every shape you create in an InDesign document has a bounding box, which is a non-printing rectangle that marks the outer dimensions of the shape.

The reference point determines how transformations will occur (in other words, which point of the object will remain in place if you change one of the position or dimension values). These points correspond to the object’s bounding box handles, as well as to the object’s center point.

Pressing Option/Alt as you drag moves a copy of the selected object (called cloning).

Group objects by pressing Command/Control G.

The CMYK color model, also called process color, uses subtractive color theory reproduce the range of printable colors by overlapping semi-transparent layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks in varying percentages from 0-100

When printed on top of each other in varying percentages, the semi-transparent inks produce the CMYK gamut, or the range of possible colors.

By itself, plain black ink often lacks density. 100% black with some percentage of another ink, is called a rich black or super black.

There are three primary types of fonts:

PostScript (Type I) fonts have two file components (outline and printer) that must both be available for output.

There are three primary types of fonts:

TrueType fonts have a single file, but (until recently) were primarily used on the Windows platform.

There are three primary types of fonts:

OpenType fonts are contained in a single file that can include more than 60,000 glyphs (characters) in a single font. They are cross-platform; the same font file can be sued on both Macintosh and Windows systems.

The overset text icon indicates that more text exists than will fit into the frame.

The top-to-bottom order of objects is called stacking order; each object you create is stacked on top of existing objects.