Ever need to know the distance between two ruler guides on your page? No need to use the Measure tool, or to drag out a temporary frame that snaps to both guides and then look at its width or height measure. InDesign already knows the distance between any two ruler guides, and can easily show you… but not in the Control panel.
Just select two or more ruler guides and look at the Info panel. If you select two horizontal guides, the panel’s “H” (height) field tells you the distance between them. (The Width field will stay blank in CS3.)
Below, the red arrows point to the selected guides, and my cursor is pointing at the Info panel’s Height readout, telling me these two guides are 5p0.364 apart.
If you select more than two guides, the readout tells you the total distance in the selection — e.g., with a selection of a bunch of horizontal guides, it’ll tell you the distance from the topmost one to the bottommost one. As you add guides to the selection by shift-clicking, the Info panel keeps up with the new measure.
When you select two or more vertical ruler guides, the “W” (width) field tells you the distance between them, and the Height field is blank.
Selecting a mix of horizontal and vertical guides renders the feature inapplicable, so both W and H will be blank.
Slightly Different in CS2
Interestingly, in CS2’s Info palette, the tip still works as described. But you get a little more information for the “other” field (W or H), the one that’s blank in CS3 depending on the selection.
It’s not real useful, though. Selecting two horizontal guides as in the previous example still shows the Height as 5p0 point blah blah, but the Width shows 51p, even if I add more guides to the selection.
Can you guess what it’s doing? Yup, it’s the width of my page guides on my letter-size page. (Selecting pasteboard guides shows a width of 204p0. Add that to your InDesigntrivia knowledge, might come in handy for a podcast Quizzler some day.)
How often do you need to know the width (or height) of the page? Not that often, and besides, you could just choose File > Document Info to see both width and height at once. Still, thought I should mention it.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on June 27, 2007
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[…] The ability to measure distance is usually used when you are using the ruler tool (shortcut “k”). When you measure a distance with the ruler tool it will show up as the D1 value, but if you Opt (ALT) click and drag from one of its end points you can draw another line (D2). The angle between the two points will also be shown in the info panel. For more information on the ruler tool please read AM’s great article from a few years ago. […]
H.M.: Your question doesn’t appear to have anything to do with this (guides) post, but you can find a two scripts that might help you here and here.
In e-publishing title case exactly means that the first letter of each word should be in upper case except the prepositions and definite articles in the middle of the sentence. Is there any option to select those exceptional cases?…
I want to set change case (title case, sentence case) in a paragraph style. Is it possible in CS2?
pethr,
I just use the text select and select all and I get the Characters, Word, Line and Paragraph Count.
Yes, Anne-Marie, that is an essential tip.
This is kind of OT, but I’m having trouble in ID CS on Win to get the info palette to show character/word count. After some mysterious set of actions (I can’t really tell what to do to get it working) it sometimes shows up but definitely doesn’t work as expected. Did anybody experienced such weird behavior? Works just fine on my mac.
Not only the same distance apart but aligned to the page or spead if you so choose.
Eugene and Ben, great tips … this should probably turn into another blog post on duplicating guides!
Here’s my contribution: Use Step and Repeat! Fast way to get one or more duplicate guides a set distance from the selected guide.
And don’t forget that you can distribute a selection of multiple guides the same distance apart via the Align palette/panel.
Better yet, select your guide and in the control palette x or y coordinate box add ‘+20mm’ to the end of the existing value and option+enter to create a copy with a 20mm offset. You can also input negative values as well.
Another little handy thing is to make a guide at the point you want one, and instead of creating a new guide for every 20 mm and inputting the data, just right click the guide and select, move guide, then you can copy the guide to a specified distance.
Very clever, Ms. Concepción! I never thought of looking there for that info.