Using InDesign to Format the Interior of a Book

[Music] hi everybody today i have a tutorial for you on how to use indesign to format the interior pages of a print book now i've only recently got to grips with using indesign in the past i was quite daunted by the adobe apps i tried photoshop and i found it quite complicated and i was also put off by the price because as an indie author i'm always trying to keep costs down and so although i was aware that indesign which is an adobe app is the standard tool used by graphic designers to format books i was just worried that i could spend money downloading a program that would be too complicated for me to use so in the past i've used pages which is the word processor on mac to format books i've used canva but i made the decision to move over to indesign and that was largely because when i was formatting children's picture books which is my previous experience of formatting my adult's book milk i paid for formatting on that one so with formatting children's picture books i needed to be able to save my pdfs with cmyk color settings and my first book lily the olympic gets lost i had to get a friend to convert my pdf but moving forward i needed to be able to save with those attributes particularly as projects became more complicated so i downloaded indesign and i watched lots of tutorials and i read lots of blogs and i found it wasn't as bad as i thought it was going to be and i was so impressed by the functionality of the program it's so clever and so i used indesign to format milk and cookies and the second edition of lily the olympic gets lost and then i deleted it so then when i was working on my current project which isn't a children's picture book it's an adult's book i wasn't concerned about the color settings in the pdfs so i didn't necessarily think that i would need indesign to format the interior of the book since it's just in black and white so i started formatting using pages and i very quickly started to miss lots of the things that indesign can do but in particular there were two reasons for why i decided to download the program again firstly pages only has the option to have a header and a footer or neither and i wanted the option to have a footer with the page number but not the header with the chapter heading and that just wasn't an option whereas in design there are lots of different variations that you can set up the other reason was to do with bleed margins now in pages the way to include bleed margins is to have them as part of the document size whereas in indesign you set up your trim size and then the bleed margins are an added extra to that that are then included when you export the file now the reason why that matters is if you have a three millimeter bleed on three edges of the page it's really hard to then tell where the center of the page is and to lay out all the different elements accurately it's also really hard in pages to figure out exactly where the bleed is whereas in indesign all of that is clear because you have your trim size and then the bleed is outside of that effectively and then it's just included when you export so for those reasons i downloaded indesign again and i learned how to deal with a book that's text based rather than image based as my previous project had been and so in a moment i'm going to share with you all the tips and tricks that i learned when i was going through that process but before i get into all of that there's two more things i wanted to mention in indesign there is an option to set up all the different elements of your book so the front matter all the different chapters the end matter to have those as separate documents and then collate them as a book now that's not the method i've used here i've just created one long document but i wanted to make you aware that you can do things that way and those tutorials and information online about how to go about that if you would prefer that method the other thing i wanted to talk about is price so all the adobe apps have a seven-day trial so if you think you'd like to try indesign you can get a seven-day trial but if you're not going to carry on do remember to cancel the trial so that you don't get charged when you decide to use a subscription there are two options there's an annual subscription where you're tied in for a year it's about 20 pounds a month you can pay annually or you can pay monthly the other option is a month to month subscription so you are only tied in for the month but it's a little bit more money it's about 30 pounds a month probably is more suitable for indie authors because it's unlikely you'll want a whole year's worth of indesign but those are the different options so all that said let's move over to my laptop screen so i can show you how i did it so let's hit new file and start setting up the document i'm going to give this a name and then the next thing to do is to put in the trim size now i'm going to keep this at the same size i was using for the last project i was working on but put your trim size in here 127 by 203 millimeters is five by eight inches and you can change two inches if you would prefer i'm going to keep this as millimeters i've got portrait selected in here you can put your approximate number of pages if you want to i'm going to keep this at 1 because there's just something i want to show you but you can put whatever you want in there because you can add or delete pages as necessary then i've got facing pages selected the reason for that is that i want to view the document as double page spreads being able to see the left and the right pages next to each other makes it far easier to figure out how your book will look because it's like having the book open in front of you and it's far easier to see which of the left pages and which are the right it just makes it much clearer so it's a good idea to have that ticked then we're going to go down to the margins and do check with your margins if there are any specifications from the print on demand or print company that you're planning to use they may have particular guidance on what margins they prefer but this is relatively standard you don't want to go smaller than 13 millimeters really this is half an inch and then on the inside i've gone a little bit higher at 19 millimeters which is about three quarters of an inch the reason for that is that this is where the gutter is so you're going to lose a little bit of the page in the gutter where the book actually opens and if you set the inside margin at the same as the outside your text would actually look off center so you do need to make an allowance for that so that's what i've gone for there and then for the top and the bottom margin i've set those around an inch 22 millimeters because i've wanted to i wanted to make some space for headers and footers if you don't want headers and footers you might want to set those at the same as your outside margin it's all kind of a matter of taste but also it does depend on the the guidance given by the company you're working with so then we need to look at the bleed this is a standard setting it tends to be three millimeters on every side other than the inside that's pretty standard but do check i want also to show you what this button does if click that it makes all the settings the same and then if i change that to three then all of those will become three that just might be helpful i'm going to click that because i want them to be different so there we go three on all sides except that one and then when you're happy click create so here's the document these are the margins that i set up you can see that this one is a bit narrower because this is the right hand side so if you imagine when you open a book the first page is on the right hand side you can also see the bleed running around the outside edges this red line here this box here this is where the text is going to go so that's what we've set up if you decide you don't like how it looks you want to make any changes you go in here and go to document setup and then you can change all of those things if you want to right so the first thing i'm going to do is to paste my book in so let's go to the book that i've written for the purposes of today i wanted to use some text that wasn't copyrighted so let's select all copy and paste and then make the text box the same size as the area so that we've got the margins in the right place and all of that now obviously this isn't the whole book so if your writing runs over onto another page this is why i only wanted to put one page in you'll see this little plus mark so let's add some more pages and if we go back to that first page we can choose that text box and press on that plus and here's the rest of the book if i then click in this space it will automatically flow those pages onto the the following pages like so um so if you haven't got enough pages that's how you add more right the first thing i want to do is to set up a title page so after my name i'm going to add a page break which is in here there we go and let's start formatting so in here i'm going to choose a font and let's make it bigger if you don't have this box open it's in here character and there's a paragraph is an option as well anyway let's make that bigger and center justify it and i want to move it down the page a bit and then my name let's make that do always check that your fonts are licensed for commercial use it's very important so i'm just going to do this roughly but you can set this up however you wish then if you want to add any pictures i'm going to put my publishing logo you can add a frame this is the frame tool and then find the file that you want to put in there here's the file i've just dragged it out of the document folder i don't want to show you the contents of my hard drive and then i'm going to put it into that frame if i right click then i can choose fitting fit content proportionally and there we go it's the right size you have the option then to change that frame if you wanted it to be bigger and refit it another option is to select the red box that's the actual image within the frame and then you can muck about with that as you wish i'm going to go back to it being small and then set it in the center there we go so that's how you add an image if you've got any images or logos or anything like that that you want to put in that's how you do it then i want a copyright page so let's say now you can look at books to see the standard wording that's used i'm just going to type a few things in as an example it's a made-up number and let's have a url okay and then i'm going to add a page break there we go and then i am going to set up a paragraph style for this so let's open ups over here paragraph styles and i want to create a new paragraph style so if we click here new paragraph style and i can go in here and i can create my paragraph style as a wish there we go and i can make it bigger or smaller whatever you want okay so then with that text selected if i apply that formatting it's it just automatically makes all of those settings apply to that text now another way of doing that if i go back is that if i um change the text down here like so then if i went to new paragraph style that part would already be populated so i have that option now i am going to go into that paragraph style that we created and i'm going to edit it i'm going to give it a name so this is my copyright page okay and i actually want that center justified now you'll notice a plus comes up that's because i've made a change and if i want i can apply that change to this paragraph style that's saved here so if i say redefine style the plus goes away now i'm going to explain a little bit more about how that works over the next few minutes so let's set up another paragraph style for my chapter headings chapter one and let's go new paragraph style and i'm gonna call this chapter and i'm gonna use this font i'm going to make it bigger there we go now it hasn't applied so we click that or center let's redefine that with a center justification good then let's have a look at this paragraph so i'm going to make this garamond and i'm going to create a new paragraph style for that and let's call this main that's all saved lovely and i actually want let's go back in there and edit that i want to make sure that the hyphenation is off because you don't have hyphenation in books generally there we go and i want this fully justified like so why is it still hyphenated it shouldn't be oh i know why hang on we've got to apply maine it's not hyphenated fully justify and then let's redefine okay so i've set up that for my main body of text i've got a chapter style and i've got this different one for my copyright page if i then choose all of this text i can say that that is also the main body click that and it automatically gives that the attributes that i'd saved in here if i then made a change so i think oh actually i wanted my main body to be 13 points and if i redefine that it changes everything so that's really really helpful so going back one thing i would like to change actually is the um the line spacing because generally the line spacing's a bit bigger in um in books than it is in like a word document and then whoops that was the wrong press the wrong button so redefine style and then everything's a bit more spaced out so let's start to get all of this set up so it looks more like a book the first page of a chapter generally starts a little bit further down the page this would probably be in the middle there we go and then i'm going to make these paragraphs look right now these aren't indented now the one way of doing this is to tab but actually this is probably a bit too big of an indent for a book now you can go into the tab settings and reduce the size of a tab that's one way of dealing with this another is to go here and indent and then you can apply that to your style that's one way of doing it another way is to go into your style your paragraph style edit it and go into indents and spacing and it's your first line indent there we go now the first paragraph doesn't have an indent and the only way i know of doing this is to do it manually so this paragraph if we remove that indent that means this paragraph is set as main with another attribute if i don't redefine the style then that won't affect anything else so i've got that set up we've got some nice spacing it's not hyphenated it's looking great the next thing i'm going to do is to start creating some sections so let's uh in fact let's go in here make sure we've got that first page selected and then go numbering and section options right now i'm going to start my numbering at one but i want a prefix for this section because in a moment i'm going to set up chapter one as another new section and i want my numbering to start there so if this then becomes page one the dot the program will become really confused that there are two page ones but if we add a prefix it doesn't get confused so we make that a and i'm going to call this front matter and so it's made all the pages a1 a2 and so on now once you get to the end of your front matter and you might have a dedication you might have um an about the author or a prologue or whatever it might be once you're past all of that then i you can start a new section so if we go in fact i need to make sure it's got that one page selected there we go and numbering and section we're going to start the page numbering at one this time there's no prefix and i'm going to call this chapter one okay good so you can see it goes a1 a2 and then one two three four five and so on excellent now the next thing that i'm going to do is to start to set up some parent pages you'll see as this all starts to come together now if i go in here you can see a parent and this is what the a parent looks like this is what's applied to our our book right now all of our pages are set up with the a parent let's start a new parent style and let's call it b here we go now we want to add some little sections to it so i'm going to add a page number so we go type insert special character markers current page number don't worry that it says b and then i want that right justified and i want it in my main style which of course is left justified so we need to redo that and then i'm going to copy this and paste it then over here line that up and i want this one to be on the right and of course i'd set an indent this is where i probably need another setting that doesn't have the indent but i'm going to remove that because otherwise you end up applying it and you don't notice that that there's something wrong and you can easily miss the fact that that there's an indent there so it's important to have lots of different styles for all the different things that you want um anyway let's add up here the name of the book which i am calling book very imaginatively and let's give that those attributes of course i've still got that indent oops and then over here obviously you can set all these up so they've got the right so that they're set the right spacing from the edge of the book you can see here there's rulers so you can get that perfect uh what i'm going to do next is copy this box put a box over here but i want this to be different for each section because i want this to have the chapter heading now you might not want to do this it depends on the type of book you have sometimes you don't want a a chapter heading you might not want headers at all but if you do want it this is how you do it you go insert special character and you want section marker and then i'm gonna write to justify that where are we there we go and then i think i'm happy with all of that so i'm going to go back to my pages and i am going to go pages apply parents pages i'm going to choose b that was the one i just set up and i'm going to apply it to pages one to nine i don't know how many pages there are let's go with that there we go so you can see it says chapter one it's automatically inserted that and i can use that same parent if i had chapter two and it would just say chapter two and then my numbering has started the name of the book over there obviously you can give these different styles you can use different fonts different sizes however you wish so that's all set up now in general the first page of a chapter does not have a heading so let's set up another new parent called c and this time i'm only going to have a page number so in here current page number and let's right justify and make sure that i've set that with the right paragraph style there we go and then i'm going to copy that over here get that in line and left justify but of course i've got that intent i really should have created a new paragraph style but there we are i don't know why that's not lining up my mind you can obviously fiddle about with these things and get them just right okay so then if i go back to my pages and i go back to here you can see the parent style a b and so on so you can see what's actually applied but i can select this page and then pages apply parent and i can apply that new one the c parent and then i've just got the page number so it's really good at being able to choose which particular attributes and of course they could have images all sorts of things whatever you want to apply to particular pages you set it up as a parent and then of course that means that if you go in and you make changes it changes it to everything so that's fantastic now now that i've done that let's look at a few extra fancy bits and pieces that we can do i'm gonna insert a table of contents so if i add a page uh i don't want the page there i want it after after here let's add two so that we've got these double pages preserved and if we go in here so of course these have been added to the first section and then this is the start of the second section you see um so in here i'm going to create a table of contents so table of contents and then i in fact before i do that i want to double check that this title actually is yes it is saved as chapter good right so we're going to go in here table of contents now we can give it a title you can call it whatever you want decide what style the title is in and then we've got to decide what it is that's telling the table of contents where the different sections are so i want it to look at the chapter headings and then it knows that that's the title and that's where the new section is so it means it will say chapter one and then the page you can in here decide whether you want the number before or after the entry or whether there's no page number at all and you can decide whether where you want the number in here and the entries we want in a different uh in a different paragraph style when you're happy with all that press ok and it should have it loaded and if i click there it is now if i add chapter 2 i can then go into table of contents and it would have this one update table of contents and that will add extra bits and it will anytime you use that paragraph style chapter it will then use that in the table of contents so this is why these paragraph styles are really important and then the next thing i want to show you you could obviously put anything in here this could be a blank page or this could have something else in it in general chapters start on the right hand side they don't have to but they often do um going to the end i'm going to add an index i'm going to add it here and let's find it in tables or something like that i can never find it if you can't find something type in help and it'll find it for you there it is type in tables and then let's say that this word here i wanted this to be indexed you hit plus and then i want this to be recorded as information hit okay you can see under i there it is and it says what page it is let's say here this word here i want that to be recorded as uh whatever the word is will come up as the automatic thing fascinating stuff and we can say that that's actually um for the next three pages if we want and then when you go into fascinating stuff it'll be multiple pages another thing you can do is i could choose another bit and i can say to add that and in fact let's make that a sub category of information and then we can put in here and if i hit ok if we go back into information you will see that a subcategory now is stuff okay when you're happy with all that you can hit save and give it a title title style i'm going to use chapter again this will mean that that goes into your table of contents something to think about and then that's pre-loaded i'm going to put it here and there it is if i then add things to index i can just hit this say replace existing index okay and it will replace it and it will just repopulate that index and it just means that even if you move things they're always going to be in the right place it's really really clever there's one last thing i want to run through which is making sure let's close this that your your writing is nicely laid out so we want to look for things like this so here is an orphan line we want orphan or widow lines anything like that and we don't really want this on its own on this page so one option especially since we've only got one word here is to try and draw that word back so you can choose a part of a paragraph or a whole paragraph and use this setting to decrease the spacing now i don't like how this looks but often this does work really nicely it's just because it's the same word repeated but you can see it's pulled that word back in which means we've now got two lines so it looks much neater you can have a look through for any time when there's just one word or one line on its own can i find another instance of it probably not um and here we go look and try and pull them back or move them forward just to make everything as easily read as possible because otherwise you get to the bottom line and it's just tricky to read so that's the way that you can you can set that as using this setting in here and i believe that's pretty much everything and you just work through your document make sure that everything is as you wish set up all your different elements of it and then you can simply export it um so you would go in here and go to uh presets press quality and that will give you a really nice pdf when you export that when you get onto this page you need to choose marks and bleeds and make sure you tick this button use document bleed settings otherwise those bleed margins that you set up won't be included in the document so make sure you tick that hit export and you're all done so i hope you found that useful please hit like if you did and leave in the comments any tips you'd like to add or any useful resources it's always great when the comments section is a resource in itself and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already for more videos like this one take care [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Emma Rosen Books

Views: 9,802

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Id: T05RrPwVYaU

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021