Each style includes detailed specifications for the appearance of one element. When you make a large-scale change on a master page, all other pages in your book will change too.įor smaller-level changes, InDesign has a system of styles, including paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, table of contents styles, and so on. How are the decisions you make carried out globally in your book? Well, that’s where InDesign really shines!Īny large-scale changes (such as changes to your trim size or margins) are made on a master page that controls all other pages. InDesign allows you much more control over the different elements in your book, both on a large scale (for example, the overall size of your pages), right down to a very small scale (such as the amount of space surrounding a single letter). Pre-made styles are available for titles and paragraphs, and are applied simply by selecting them. In Word, you begin at the top of your document and work downward in a linear fashion. Most likely you’ve written your book in Microsoft Word, and are familiar with how Word works. And once you’ve done that, you can control every little thing about the type: the size, the amount of space between lines and between letters, the number of lines on a page, and so on. It is more like a drawing program in which you make shapes and then pour text into the shapes. In general, InDesign cannot be thought of as any kind of word processing program. You’ll soon discover that designing a book is nothing like writing a book, for you’ll be more concerned with the way the words look than what they say. The following excerpt from chapter 1, From Word to InDesign, gives you the idea.

We discuss the differences between using Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, and invite you to enjoy the amount of control you’ll suddenly have over the way your words look. The first chapter of Book Design Made Simple explains why you’ll find it worthwhile to learn InDesign.

Indesign microsoft