Adobe InDesign provides a number of tools for applying color, including the Toolbox, the Swatches panel, the Color panel, the Color Picker, and the Control panel.

When you apply a color, you can specify whether the color applies to the stroke or fill of an object. The stroke is the border or frame of an object, and the fill is the background of an object. When you apply a color to a text frame, you can specify whether the color change affects the text frame or the text inside the frame.

In the Toolbox or in the Color or Swatches panel, select the Formatting Affects Text or Formatting Affects Container to determine if color is applied to the text or the text frame.

Fill box B. Formatting Affects Container C. Stroke box D. Formatting Affects Text. You can apply color to any grayscale image, provided it does not contain alpha or spot channels.

If you import an image with a clipping path, select the clipping path using the Direct Selection tool to apply color to the clipped area only. The Color Picker lets you choose colors from a color field or specify colors numerically. Original color B. New color C. Color field D. Color slider triangles E. Color spectrum. InDesign adds the color to the Swatches panel, using the color values as its name. The Toolbox displays the last color or gradient you applied.

You can apply this color or gradient directly from the Toolbox. An easy way to apply colors or gradients is to drag them from a color source to an object or panel. Drag-and-drop lets you apply colors or gradients to objects without first selecting the objects. You can drag the following:. The last-used, in-gamut color swatch located next to the out-of-gamut icon in a panel. The fill or stroke of a path. Using the Selection toolselect a text or object frame; or using the Text toolselect a range of text.

To apply color to selected text, click the Text button. To apply color to a selected object or text container such as a frame or a tableclick the Object button. Click a color or gradient swatch. The selected color or gradient is applied to any selected text or object, and it appears in the Color panel and in the Fill box or Stroke box in the Toolbox. You can set the default fill or stroke colors the same way you set other InDesign defaults.

Although the Swatches panel is the recommended panel for working with colors, you can also mix colors by using the Color panel. You can add the current Color panel color to the Swatches panel at any time. The Color panel is most useful for mixing unnamed colors.

If you select an object that currently uses a named swatch, editing its color using the Color panel changes the color of that object only. If you want to edit the color throughout the document, double-click its swatch in the Swatches panel.

Stroke box C. Formatting Affects Container D. You can adobe indesign cc user guide free color themes from selected areas, images, or objects in your InDesign document. You can also choose a adobe indesign cc user guide free from an image, the whole image, or the whole layout. Basically, you can generate color themes from any colors in your artwork. Use the Color Theme tool to pick a single color or theme and add the color theme to the swatches panel. Add these colors to the layout, add them to the Swatches panel.

You can also save them to your Creative Cloud adobe indesign cc user guide free. Click the Color Theme tool on the Tools panel. You can use the shortcut I to toggle between the Color Theme tool and the Eyedropper tool. Click any part of the layout to pick a color. You can also leverage colors from any artwork placed in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other file.

Color is retained once selected using the theme tool. After picking up colors, if you switch tool to perform some other operation, say drawing any object, and then reselect the Color Theme tool, the theme picked up earlier would be retained. Unless you press the ESC key to close the panel, the theme picked up is retained for reuse.

On pressing the ESC key, everything gets cleared. Roll your mouse to observe areas marked automatically by InDesign where you can create a color theme from. Click a section and InDesign creates a color theme. A color theme is made of five different colors.

Click the flyout menu to view the other color choices generated. Click to view all themes B. Add the current color theme to swatches C. Save to current CC Library. Click the flyout menu A from the imageto see the other theme choices generated for the same color theme, such as Colorful, Bright, Deep, and Muted.

If you do not like the color theme generated, press the Esc key and try again, or press the Alt key to temporarily switch to Pick mode to collect new theme. To apply the colors, you can select a single color adobe indesign cc user guide free the Color Theme tool. Roll over the mouse to the page item. The Eyedropper appears half-full, click to change the fill or stroke. When you roll over the mouse over text, the eyedropper changes to text. You can apply a color generated from the Color Theme tool on text.

Double-click the Color Theme tool. Colors picked and added to swatches honor document intent and automatically converts to appropriate color space before being added to swatches or dropped on other objects. Three options are provided to choose from:. Save to the current CC Library. Click B to add these colors to the Swatches panel. The color theme gets added to the Swatches panel as a folder.

You can apply color values using hexadecimal RGB code, as well. There are three ways in which you can apply a hex color value:.

Use the Eyedropper tool to copy fill and stroke attributes, such as color, from any object in an InDesign file, including an imported graphic. By default, the Eyedropper tool loads all available fill and stroke attributes of an object and sets the default fill and stroke attributes of any new objects you draw. You can use the Eyedropper Options dialog box to change the attributes the Eyedropper tool copies.

You can also use the Eyedropper tool to copy type and transparency attributes. Click any object that has the fill and stroke attributes you want to sample. A loaded eyedropper appearsand the selected objects are automatically updated with the fill and stroke attributes of the object you clicked. To change other objects to the same attributes, click the objects with the loaded eyedropper.

Without releasing the Alt or Option key, click an object containing the attributes that you want to copy, adobe indesign cc user guide free then release the Alt or Option key so that you can drop the new attributes on another object.

In the Toolbox, double-click the Eyedropper tool. Select the attributes in the Fill Settings and Stroke Adobe indesign cc user guide free sections that you want to copy with the Eyedropper tool, and then click OK.

To pick up only the fill or stroke color of an object and no other attributes, Shift-click the object with the Eyedropper tool. When you adobe indesign cc user guide free the color to another object, only the fill or stroke color is applied, depending on whether the stroke or fill is on top in the toolbar. Click the Content Grabber, or use the Direct Selection tool to select the image. An image in PSD format can contain multiple layers, but the bottom layer must be opaque.

In addition, the grayscale image cannot contain alpha or spot channels. Color groups enable you to organize your color schemes better and to exchange frequently used color swatches across applications. Color groups help you to:. To create a color group, click the Color Group icon on the Swatches panel.

Alternatively, you can also create a color group from the flyout and adobe indesign cc user guide free menu. To give a name to the color group at the time of creation, you can use any of the options or hold the Alt key Win or Option Key Mac adobe indesign cc user guide free you click the new color group button. You can drag-and-drop multiple swatches from the root as well as from other color groups into the created color group. Right-click on a color swatch to explore other options. You can switch to a Color Group view and work extensively with color groups.

Click the filter icon adobe indesign cc user guide free the bottom of the panel and select Show Color Groups. This enables you to work with color groups adobe indesign cc user guide free.

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Desktop Publishing DTP is the creation of electronic forms of information such as documents, presentations, brochures, books, or even website content using computer programs. DTP has evolved to be an important component of creating and disseminating information as it allows an amalgamation of various tasks that are generally performed independently at printing presses such as layouts, typesetting, graphic design, etc.

Earlier, DTP was specifically meant to cater to printed matter but modern DTP allows for even more forms of electronic content. A modern DTP software can be your word processor, graphic design tool and publishing tool, all rolled into one package.

With the explosive growth of smartphones and mobile PCs, the way people consume information has changed dramatically over the last decade. Modern DTP software enables content output that caters dynamically to all screen sizes, without the need to republish the same for each device or form factor. Electronic pages commonly refer to websites, manuals, eBooks, digital archives, presentations, etc. This tutorial is an example of an electronic page which can be opened in a browser.

Virtual pages on the other hand are electronic pages created in the DTP software which are eventually published as printed pages.

Virtual pages allow the author to visualize exactly how the printed page will look and can help in easy editing. This means all the changes and formatting that are made will be exactly replicated in print. DTP software comes in all shapes and sizes. There are software to cater to every need right from free software to professional grade subscription based software. Although InDesign has now taken over the DTP market, in this section, we will take a look at some of the popular DTP software other than InDesign that are also quite popular with the publishers.

PageMaker was first originally developed by Aldus and was later acquired by Adobe in the 90s. PageMaker is one of the most popular DTP software even today but its development has been stopped after version 7 although it is still being marketed to a select set of users. PageMaker has tools for almost all DTP applications except book publishing.

It has support for plugins and runs on both Mac and Windows. QuarkXpress was the de facto publishing standard before the advent of InDesign. It is still under active development on both Mac and Windows and the latest version is more or less feature similar to InDesign. The latest update also includes the ability to export HTML5 interactive publications.

It also supports plugins called, XTensions for additional capabilities. Microsoft Publisher is part of the Office suite and is distributed as a standalone application. It is extremely simple to create flyers, brochures or cover art with this program as the interface is similar to other Office programs such as Word or Excel. It is more of an entry level software targeted at home and small businesses and does not directly compete with QuarkXpress or InDesign. Microsoft Publisher is very easy to use and supports professional effects for text and pictures along with the ability to natively import albums from Facebook, Flickr, and other cloud services.

PagePlus has now become a legacy software with the reins passing on to Affinity Publisher, which is yet to be released.

It also has advanced features such as font kerning and dynamic text flow along with a host of templates on the Serif website. An icing on the cake is the presence of an integrated photo editor called PhotoLab , which gives easy access to picture correction tools. Adobe InDesign is the industry leading DTP software for designing and layout of professional documents for the web, print, as well as for mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones.

InDesign has evolved from being a successor to PageMaker in version 1. The workflow in InDesign also comprises of word processing, which is usually done in a standalone word processing program such as Microsoft Word, although InDesign is also a capable word processor in itself.

However, a lot of Microsoft Word styles are not carried into InDesign when the users switch between these programs. Adobe released a complimentary word processing program to InDesign called InCopy , which can read and export the various text formatting styles that InDesign uses. InDesign uses the. Newer versions have backward compatibility with files created in older versions of the program.

Newer versions can save the InDesign document as a. For even more backward compatibility, the newer version can also export in the. InDesign can either be purchased individually or as a part of the Creative Suite under a Creative Cloud subscription. The subscription enables the user to receive ongoing product updates without purchasing new versions every time a major version number update is released. The latest version of Creative Cloud can be downloaded by logging into the Adobe website and downloading the Creative Cloud app which will allow you to install the various CC programs that you are eligible for.

You can also download trial versions to test drive the software before committing to buying them. In addition to commonly used apps, Adobe is introducing two new apps with the version called Experience Designer XD and Project Felix.

Adobe XD provides UX designers and UX testers with the tools to create great user interfaces for a variety of screen sizes and device form factors. You can design interactive prototypes to test out a wide variety of UX designs to ensure maximum app engagement by the users. Project Felix is under beta testing and it aims to combine 2D and 3D workflows in one app without having to learn the nuances of 3D creation. The version of InDesign comes with some great new features to boost your productivity.

It includes new footnote capabilities to create footnotes that can span across multiple pages and enhancements to the OpenType fonts. It includes direct integration with Adobe Stock to find the assets licensed by Adobe, which you can simply drag and drop into your document. You can also add public Creative Libraries, where you can share assets with a team across all your Adobe apps. You can directly buy industry leading fonts from the Typekit marketplace from within InDesign.

These fonts are available to all the other CC apps as well. It is important to properly understand the user interface to get the most out of InDesign. Let us take a quick tour of the user interface. What we see above is the default interface for most installations. Remember that the interface is fully customizable. The interface is grouped into many panels as follows.

First up, is the Application Bar on the top of the window beside the Help menu which allows us to set the document zoom level or allow turning the rulers and guides on and off. It also allows us to tile multiple windows vertically or horizontally. The Br and St icons stand for Adobe Bridge and Adobe Stock respectively and you may or may not see them depending on your installation.

Below the application bar is the long strip called the Control Panel which is a quintessential component of the UI. The Control Panel basically allows you to change properties such as text formatting, color fill, and a host of contextually dependent functions. It is freely movable and you can float or dock it.

Next, we will take a look at the blank document. This blank document was created using the default options in the New dialog box. We will be learning more about the New dialog box in the next chapter. If you observe closely, the blank document is surrounded by black borders. That is the limit of the printed page. The pink guides on the top and bottom define the margins. The purple guides on the left and right are column guides. If you have multiple columns, you will find that the purple guides define each column.

Neither the pink nor the purple guides print out or will be seen in the exported PDF. The Toolbar which is usually to the left of the main workspace contains all the tools required to work with the document. It has the selection tools, the text tools, eyedropper tools, etc. Clicking on these tools will open up further functions relevant to that tool in the Control Panel described above. Some tools like the Type tool for example have a small arrow underneath them which can reveal a similar tool with a different function.

To the right of the workspace is the Panels bar which has some additional fucntions. What you see on the Panels bar can vary based on the workspace. Similar to the other window components described above, the Panels bar can be moved around freely or docked to a suitable position. Clicking a button in the Panels bar will open up additional options. For example, clicking the Stroke option will open a pop-out window allowing us to change the properties of the stroke.

You can add more functions to the Panel bar by going to the Window menu and choosing the desired function. It is important to be able to set the ruler measurements as desired. There are two ways of doing this. One of the ways, is to right-click on the point where the horizontal and vertical rulers intersect and select the desired measurement units.

This is detailed in the subsequent chapters. Being able to properly define the document that you intend to create is a fundamental prerequisite to get the best out of InDesign. This opens the New Document dialog box.

There are other options in the New menu, which allows you to create a Book or a Library which we will deal with in later chapters. We shall focus on the Document command for now.

It pays to have a general understanding of the various options available in the New Document dialog box so let us have a look at each of them. Before moving on, it helps to turn on the Preview checkbox in the lower left corner of the dialog box. This creates a preview of the document in which it is easy to visualize changes such as page dimensions and other properties before creating the actual document. Note, that the preview will disappear when you cancel creating the document.

We see that there are a lot of options in the New Document dialog box. The first step is to define the intent of the document. Expanding the Intent dropdown menu gives us three options — Print, Web and Mobile. The Print option is the de facto option that is chosen by most working with InDesign. It is not just for printing documents on a printer, but also used for almost all forms of publishing such as a product sheet or template or even a document for uploading to the Web.