InDepth: Align Panel
Why So Many Distribute Objects Buttons? Many users are confused by the various Distribute Objects buttons because sometimes, clicking any one of them appears to have the same result as clicking the others. This response occurs when all of your selected objects are the same size. If you select differently sized objects, you’ll see why InDesign provides choices here. The four objects in Figure 5 have different widths, so when I Figure 3: Distributing selected objects: Before (top) and after (bottom) clicking the Distribute Horizontal Centers button.
If you can’t tell what each button in the panel does by its icon, just hold the pointer over a button to see that button’s name as a tool tip. If all you’re doing is simple alignment or distribution, you don’t even need to open the Align panel. When objects are selected, the align and distribute buttons also appear in the space-saving Control panel (Figure 4). If you select objects and don’t see the align and distribute buttons on the Control panel, either your monitor is not wide enough to display them (they appear toward the right side of the Control panel, so they don’t appear when your monitor is set to 1024 pixels wide), or you might have customized your Control panel layout to hide them.
Figure 5. The Distribute Object buttons produce different results when objects aren’t the same size. From top to bottom, with the affected edge marked in red: Original positions, Distribute Left Edges, Distribute Horizontal Centers, and Distribute Right Edges.
click Distribute Left Edges, Distribute Center Edges, and Distribute Right Edges, the results are different because the distances between the corresponding edges of each object are different. Aligning Objects to the Layout In previous issues of this magazine, you’ve seen tricks for centering an item or group on the page in CS and CS2. InDesign CS3 doesn’t require any tricks: Centering to the layout is easy and instant, thanks to that new unlabeled pop-up menu at the bottom of the Align palette (Figure 6). Let’s call it the “Align To” pop-up menu. By default, you’ll see that the Align To pop-up menu says Align to Selection. As I mentioned earlier, this means that InDesign aligns or distributes within a rectangle based on the outermost selected objects. In other words, if you click the Align Left Edges button, everything aligns to the left edge of the left-most object. To align objects to the page instead of aligning to other objects, choose Align to Page from the pop-up menu. You can also choose Align to Margins or Align to Spread.
Figure 6: New options in the Align panel pop-up menu simplify tasks such as centering an object on the layout.
Figure 4 (left): The align and distribute buttons are also available in the Control panel.
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