Modifying the Pasteboard
To change the size of the pasteboard, choose Edit > Preferences > Guides & Pasteboard in Windows or InDesign > Preferences > Guides & Pasteboard in MacOS. Under Pasteboard Options, enter new values for Horizontal Margins and Vertical Margins to specify how far the pasteboard extends out from the page or spread. To change the color of the pasteboard in the Preview Mode, select Preview Background and choose a color.
Adding Guides for Bleeds and Slugs
A bleed occurs when an image or element on a page touches the edge of the page, extending beyond the trim edge, leaving no margin. It may bleed or extend off one or more sides of a document. A slug is usually non-printing Information such as a title and date used to identify a document. It appears on the pasteboard, generally near the bottom. You can set up guides for slugs and bleeds in the New Document dialog screen or Document Setup dialog screen. If you are printing to your desktop printer, you do not need any bleed allowance. However, when you prepare a document for commercial printing, any element that bleeds should extend off the document page by 1/8 inch. Pull guides from InDesign’s rulers and position them 1/8 inch outside the boundaries of the document. Elements that bleed off the page snap to those guides, giving even margins all around. A separate guide can be positioned beneath the document to indicate the slug location. InDesign’s default rulers measure beginning from the upper-left corner of a document. You can change the rulers’ origin point of in a couple of ways:
Go to the top-left corner where the rulers meet. Click on the corner with your mouse and drag diagonally toward the right. When you release the mouse button, that’s where the rulers’ origin point will be. To reset the rulers to their default position, double-click on the top-left corner.You can also customize the rulers by going to Edit > Preferences in Windows or InDesign > Preferences in macOS and select Units & Increments. Look at the section Ruler Units. There is a setting called Origin where you can choose between Page, Spread, or Spine. While the Page and Spread option are pretty obvious, the Spine is where the pages will be bound.
Under Color, you can choose a color for these items:
Select Margins to select a color for the page margins.Select Columns to select a color for the column guides on the document page.Select Bleed to set the color of the bleed guide.Select Slug to set the color of the slug guide.
In Preferences, you can click Guides In Back to display the guides behind the objects on the page and Snap To Zone to change how close one must be to snap to a grid or guide.
