4
BASELINE GRID
If you run your eyes horizontally across your columns now
they’re full of text (right-click one and select “Insert Filler
Text” if you haven’t got any), you may notice the lines don’t line
up. This is often fine in the world of newspapers, but considered
messy in magazines, and can be fixed with a baseline grid—a
series of horizontal lines your text can snap to. Open the Baseline
Grid Manager using “View > Show Baseline Grid Manager”
or using the button at the top of the interface that looks like a
bunch of lines, and check the “Use Baseline Grid” box. The “Start
Position” is an offset that moves the entire grid, so you can start
it at the top of your columns. Before setting this, check the “Show
Baseline Grids” box so you can see what you’re doing. Now alter
the “Start Position” so a grid line intersects perfectly with the
top of one of your text columns. We generally set “Relative To”
to “Top of Spread,” and “Grid Spacing” to whatever the “Leading”
setting is for your body text. (Leading is the gap between lines,
so called because early printers used lead to separate lines; it’s
usually a little larger than your point size, so we’re using 9pt text
on 11pt leading.) In our experience using Quark, InDesign, and
Publisher, locking to a baseline grid always messes something
up, whether it’s because you’ve got a drop cap (the large capital
letter at the beginning of an article) or a crosshead (the larger
lines used to separate sections of text) that’s a different size
to your body text. Generally, though, it’s useful for making
l ayouts neat, even if it does lead to lots of fiddling [Image D].5
ASSETS PANEL
Similar to the Master Pages palette, in that it stores
content for you to reuse, the Assets panel enables
you to store a copy of a frame to reuse later. Whether it’s a
text frame with just the right number of formatted characters
in it, or an image frame of the correct aspect ratio, it can saveDCEtime because you don’t need to recreate the asset from
scratch. Open the Assets panel, which is in a tab next to
Pages, and create a new Category by dropping down
the panel’s menu. Rename it if you want. Then,
select the frames you want from your document,
open the drop-down menu for the Category you
created, and select “Add From Selection.” Your
frames appear in the Assets panel, and can be
dragged back on to the document as many times as
you need. Note that if your frames are from a master
page, you need to go to the master page itself to add
them to the Assets panel [Image E].REFER TO
MAXIMUM PC
VOL. 25 NO. 2
PG. 68Your Assets panel is saved on your PC and appears at the
side of any document you open in Publisher, useful for
transferring frames, but less so if you move computers—
use “Embed In Current Document” from the Assets panel’s
drop-down menu if you want to take it with you.
To export your assets to send to someone else, gather
them all together under a single “Category” heading. Drop
down the panel’s menu, and choose “Export.” Give the file
a name, and save it on a removable drive, ready to move
to another PC. The assets file can get quite large if it has
a lot of embedded images in it. To import on a different
PC, open Publisher, open the Assets panel, drop down the
menu, choose “Import Assets,” navigate your way to your
exported file, and hit “OK.”ASSETS ACROSS
DOCUMENTS
maximumpc.com MAR 2020 MAXIMUMPC 69