One of my personal favorite features of InDesign (and other creative pro tools) is its ability to convert between one measurement system and another on the fly.
Once upon a time, when my daily bread was won doing magazine layout and periodical makeovers, I lived and breathed picas and points. All my layouts were pica-based measurement, and geek that I was, I even knew how tall I was as measured in picas and points (you can laugh, but you too know the weird stuff designers do while brainstorming a layout at 4 am).
The more my work branched out into advertising, packaging, and other areas of graphic design and publishing, and then training and consulting, the less I worked exclusively in picas. Container label templates are often set metrically, so my design elements were sized in millimeters and centimeters. Most of the advertising and graphic design world works in inches–primarily decimal, but once in a while fractional. Collaborating across oceans, I even deal on occassion with job specs or digital documents set in Ciceros and Didots. Nowadays, I usually keep InDesign and my other tools using inches decimal, but once in a while I have to revisit some old work that uses a different measurement system.
InDesign makes work easy if, like me, you work in one system and once in a while have to dip into another.
Let’s say you’re working with a document measurement system of decimal inches (set in Preferences > Units & Increments) when your London client sends her logo sheet. In addition to specifying the PMS colors and language variants, the logo sheet implicitly states minimum logo usages sizes in millimeters. Now, you could go to Google.com and ask it to “convert X mm to inches” and bring the returned value back to InDesign, or you could save yourself a trip and just let InDesign do the conversion.
Place or copy the appropriate client logo into InDesign and go to the Width measurement field on the Control or Transform palette. The measurement you see is in inches, but that’s irrelevant. Replace that field’s contents with the logo sheet’s measurement, appending mm. Hit Enter/Return. On the fly, InDesign will both resize the graphic and frame and do the conversion back into inches. Now do the same for Height (if the width and height weren’t linked).
Not too shabby, huh? Of course, it’s not an every day thing, but it has it’s uses.
Need to fit a headline into a 1.5‑inch space? Instead of incrementally bumping up the type by eye, the Character palette Font Size field to 1.5 in. Done properly, first line indent on paragraphs should be measured in ems–the width of the font’s capital M–specifically one to four ems. Unfortunately, InDesign doesn’t understand ems as a measurement system, but you can get pretty close by entering points in the indent field. Theoretically, 12 pt type should have a 12 pt em; in practice with variable width type that’s rarely so, but it’s close, and you’ll have more control and closer results using points than inches.
The same trick works for any measurement system InDesign understands. Here are the measurement shorthands available:
| System | Shorthand | Example |
| Inches | in, i, ” | X in, Xi, X” |
| Millimeters | mm | X mm |
| Centimeters | cm | X cm |
| Ciceros | c | X c |
| Points | pt | X pt |
| Picas | p | Xp, XpY |
| (Represented by the Y, pica measurements may be followed by a points value.) | ||