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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