Margins and Columns VS Document Properties...

[hughc46560181]

I've inherited an InDesign document with Margins and Columns set up. I prefer to work with Guides set up on a series of master pages, not Margins and Coumns. So I want to 'deactivate' Margins and Columns in this document. But I can't find a way to do this. Is there a way??

More thoughts on this ~

As I understand it, once Margins and Columns has been 'activated' in an InDesign doc, this overrides values for margins entered in Document Setup, Document Properties and Adjust Layout. I can still edit values for margins in all of these other places, but these changes have no effect on the document or individual pages. If Margins and Columns needs to work this way - i.e. to override all the other ways to edit margins - I think the other methods for editing margins should be 'locked' and greyed out when Margins and Columns is activated, with a message on mouse click or hover saying something like 'Margins and Columns is activated and is now the only way to edit margins in this document'.

And - if there isn't one - there should be a way to deactivate Margins and Columns.

[rob day]

There are plenty of other examples of properties that an inexperienced user might expect to be a settable document property.

Hyphenation is a paragraph property because it would be perfectly normal to want it off for certain paragraphs and on for others. Language is a character property because a document might need to be multilingual, so it can’t be a document level property.

Margins and Columns can’t be a document level property because it would not be unusual to need pages with different margins, columns, or even page sizes with in the same document.

[hughc46560181]

But Margins is a document level property that is overriden when I alter margins using Layout>Margins and Columns or at the Page>Edit Page level, no . . ? 🤔

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@hughc46560181

Do you have just text - in one thread / Story - or are there graphic elements that are not Anchored in the text?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I'd wager this is for a more visual layout than a text/document based one. I know columns etc. are a bit of a clutter when I am doing a more free-form or otherwise not rigidly organized page.

[hughc46560181]

Do you have just text - in one thread / Story - or are there graphic elements that are not Anchored in the text?

I'd wager this is for a more visual layout than a text/document based one. I know columns etc. are a bit of a clutter when I am doing a more free-form or otherwise not rigidly organized page.

Thanks both - yes indeed this is for a visual layout rather than a primarily text-based layout. Graphic elements are the main event and are not anchored in text columns.

This is why I often prefer to use Layout>Create Guides rather than Layout>Margins and Columns. I find that guides give me more control over vertical arrangement of images in a layout. Others in my field (landscape architecture) seem to like to have columns on as a kind of 'rough guide' for page layouts, but as you say @James Gifford—NitroPress, I find this clutters up the page, esp when I'm also using guides.

This is why I felt it would make sense if there were two distinct approaches to setting up pages/documents in InDesign - (i) Layout>Margins and Columns for column-based layouts and (ii) Layout>Guides for more visual layouts. InDesign does offer these two approaches of course, but I find the way that once anything has been edited with Layout>Margins and Columns, this overrides the ability to edit margins using Properties>Documents>Margins strange/counterintuitive in general and especially in relation to (ii).

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

yes indeed this is for a visual layout rather than a primarily text-based layout. Graphic elements are the main event and are not anchored in text columns.

This topic has become TL;DR so this may have been mentioned, but InDesign is primarily a publication/page layout tool, so its integral focus on margins, columns and basically text layout is not exactly a bug or a design oversight.

What you're doing is more how Illustrator is used — and there's another discussion here somewhere about the overlap of AI, PS and ID for "layout" purposes, and the history of AI especially being used for more free-form layout like magazine pages.

I just can't get behind your notion that ID should have a "free form layout" mode without the starting point of margins and columns, since (as we've established) you can null them out and work in a different mode with very little effort. You just can't turn an ID page into an AI artboard, and I don't think it would be useful evolution to support that overall mode to any greater extent than ID already does.

[hughc46560181]

Hi James, you're right this topic has become TL;DR but fwiw my thoughts on this now are -

i) Why doesn't Adobe replace the current limited functionality available at Properties>Documents>Margins with the more powerful functionality available at Layout>Margins and Columns?

ii) For users like me who work primarily on visual layouts rather than text-based, column formatted layouts, I'm not sure it's particularly logical or intuitive to bundle Margins and Columns together in a single dialogue as at present. But I'll make do with the 'setting the columns value to 1' as a workaround

[Mike Witherell]

One of the reasons I rarely use the Properties panel is that it tries to be the quik-mart of most things you commonly need, but leaves out the deeper things. Hence, it often dissatisfies me.

I have taught many students about the Document Setup dialog for early on setup decisions; versus the File > Document Setup along with Layout > Margins and Columns when you realize you have to re-rig a document. Even while teaching it, I have always wondered why margins and columns are not also available in File > Document Setup. That always seemed unnecessarily confusing to me.

The longer I work at this art, the more I appreciate underlying grids, margins, columns, baselines... And also increasingly I appreciate the artistic balance of height to width ratios for all graphics. 

Has anyone read "Leonardo da Vinci" by Walter Isaacson?

[hughc46560181]

Thanks Mike, it's good to know I'm not the only one who wonders why InDesign is set up the way it is in relation to this!

[Mike Witherell]

Yes, even an excellent software like InDesign can continue to be polished. 

I think that a software should somehow educate a new user on its design philosophy and purpose and origins. In the case of InDesign, it is rooted in the making of books and magazines and controlling many pages. Controlling a consistency and sameness is important to long documents and publications. InDesign philosophically assumes you drew something free-form in some other software (Illustrator) and then placed it onto a page in InDesign in preparation of printing or some other form of digital publishing.

[hughc46560181]

Yes, this is why InDesign is a much more appropriate software for my purposes - producing multi-page (up to about 50 pages max) visual reports for various Landscape Architecture proposals - than Illustrator as someone suggested above. If I need to produce a particularly fancy 'freeform' page layout I might well use Illustrator, but I'll then want to place this .ai file in an InDesign doc with a host of other visual content, text, titles, page numbers, consultants logos etc. 

[hughc46560181]

Ok thanks All I'm signing off here now. If we've achieved nothing else, I'm now more familiar with the quirks of Indesign!