InDesign and Liquid Page Rules - Digital Art and Design

Now that we have mobile devices as well as computer monitors being used to read content, it's inevitable that we will need to create layouts for several screen resolutions. As we all know, each mobile device has a different size screen and some also have retina display. The thought of this can be overwhelming but this upgrade of InDesign^R CS6 is all about multiple layouts and reusing content.

Liquid Page Rules

InDesign CS6 has some new features attached to the Page tool that will help you design flexible liquid layouts and preview them on the fly. The new Liquid Page Rules let you determine how objects on the page will display when there is a change in orientation, size or aspect ratio.

Click File - Document Setup to open the Document Setup dialog box. Here we have a new option, Digital Publishing, in the Intent menu. We also have some new settings in the Page Size menu including iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire/Nook and Android 10".

Let's set the document to Digital Publishing and iPad. By choosing Digital Publishing, InDesign automatically sets the color mode to RGB and the measurements to pixels.
To begin working with the new Liquid Page Rules, click on the Page tool in the Toolbar. This will load the Option Bar (Control Panel) at the top with some new controls. The Width and Height are set to the screen size for the iPad and we also have a menu for Liquid Page Rule options.

Off
Scale
Re-Center
Object-Based
Guide-Based
Controlled by Master.

You will also see a new blue box around the page. We will use the eight handles on this box to temporarily change the dimensions of the page to preview the effect of the Liquid Page Rules.

When we set the option to Scale and drag the corner handle of the blue box to resize the page, we can preview how the elements on the page will scale and reposition. When we release the mouse button, the page snaps back into its original layout.
If we use the Re-Center option and change the page, the elements will remain centered within the page but will not be scaled.
When we use the Guide-Based option and drag a ruler guide with the Page tool, it will change into a Liquid Layout Guide. As you change the page, the elements on the page are constrained by the Liquid Layout Guides.
The option I find most useful is the Object-Based option. With this option you can control each design element on the page individually. When you select an object, you will see four pins appear. You will use these pins to "pin" the object to the edge of the page.

As you can see, the pins are empty and objects are unpinned by default. To pin the text box to the left edge of the page, we will click the empty pin next to the left side of the text box. When we do this, the pin becomes filled and moves to the edge of the page, indicating that when we resize the page, the distance between the left side of the text box and the edge of the page will be maintained.

We can also use the Liquid Layout panel to set the pins. In the Liquid Layout panel, we can set the Liquid Page Rule to Object-Based and use the checkboxes to set the pins for the selected object on the page.

*Adobe provided a copy of this software to me for review purposes.

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