In Adobe InDesign, when you zoom to actual size (100%, Command/Control-1) it really doesn't zoom to actual size. That means, if you zoom a 3.5x2-inch business card to 100% (what the InDesign View menu calls "Actual Size") and hold a ruler up to your screen, the image onscreen won't measure 3.5x2-inches. This is due to the differences in screen resolutions on different computers.
So what can you do to easily zoom to "Actual Size"? Well, you can create a script for InDesign and then set the keyboard shortcut for that script to Command/Control-1, so that when you press Control-1 to zoom to actual size. you actually get actual size.
First you need to figure out what zoom percentage is actual size on your computer. I took out a business card and drew a 3.5 x 2 box in InDesign, then zoomed in until the on-screen image was the same size as the actual business card. For me, this was 140%.
Then you have to create the script. This is a simple, one line script.
Open any text editor that can create plain text files (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit* on Mac).
Create a new file and paste the following text into it (replacing the 140 with whatever the zoom percentage works for your computer):
try {app.layoutWindows[0].zoomPercentage = 140 } catch (e) {};
Save this file, using the file extension jsx. I saved mine as "Zoom 140 Percent.jsx".
Put this file into your InDesign scripts folder:
Mac OS: Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/[version]/Scripts
Windows XP: Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\[version]\Scripts
Windows Vista: Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\[Version]\Scripts
To run this script, open your scripts panel (Windows->Automation->Scripts) and double-click the scripts.
To create a keyboard shortcut for this script, edit your keyboard shortcuts by choosing menu item: Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts.
This works in InDesign CS3--Mac & Windows. Haven't tried it in other versions.
You can also download the script file here (it's set to 130%): http://tinyurl.com/IDZoom130
*TextEdit normally saves files in Rich Text Format by default. You must save this script as plain text. To save a TextEdit file as a plain text file, choose menu item Format->Make Plain Text. You will then be able to save this as a plain text file. Make sure you use the file extension ".jsx" when you save the file.
3 comments:
Can you update this for CS4?
It was very helpfull in CS 3 but seems not working in CS4.
Would be great!
try {app.layoutWindows[0].zoomPercentage = 140 } catch (e) {};
Just tested it with CS4, works great!
Designing an iPad or iPhone screen, I've found that 'actual size' doesn't correspond when using pixel size vs mm or inches. To get actual size in InDesign for pixels, I've found it to be a zoom of 72.2% for MacBook with 1280 x 800 resolution.
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