Cameron Chapman

This article is a technical look at setting up a template in Adobe InDesign. It is not a beginner level tutorial and expects you to have some familiarity with InDesign. I’m including this here because when I was looking for information on setting up book templates I found tutorials severely lacking. Starting from scratch seemed a bit daunting and was discouraging at first. Hopefully this tutorial will make things easier for others doing the same thing.

Photo by deanj, via Flickr

I’ve just finished setting up the Adobe InDesign template for the chapters of the nonfiction book I’m working on. When I worked in magazine publishing, we used a mix of InDesign and Quark for our page layouts. But if you’re using Photoshop for your cover or any other part of your book’s design, using InDesign has the advantage of being able to pull in native .psd files. It’s also been about a year since I’ve used either and I’m finding InDesign easier to get used to using again (probably because I use Photoshop on a regular basis).

When laying out a book, there are a lot of stylistic choices to take into account. Here are a few basics to remember:

• Serif fonts (like Times New Roman or Garamond) are easier to read in print than sans serif fonts (like Arial and Helvetica). But serif fonts work great for chapter headings, title pages, and the like, where the sizing is significantly larger.
• The spacing between lines (leading) should be around 1.5 lines (I used an 11 point type size, so my line spacing is 17 points). Play around with it until it looks about the same as other books, or until it’s easy for you to read (you might want to print out a couple of pages to check it in actual size).
• Your paragraph indents should be equivalent to your line spacing (17 point line spacing means a 17 point indent).
• Margins should be a minimum of .5″ on the outside edges and .75″ on the inside edge. I ended up using .5″ on the top and bottom, .75″ on the other outside edge, and 1″ on the inside edge.

So here are step-by-step instructions for how I set up my chapter templates:

Start by opening a new document. Make sure you specify your page size here (I’m using a 6″x9″ book size) and your margins (InDesign uses picas and points, but if you insert the inch symbol ” after your size, it will automatically convert it).

Once your document opens, go to your A-Master page. Insert automatic page numbering here, as well as any guides you want for your chapter headers, etc. I renamed this master page to “Chap Beginning”. This becomes the master page for the first page of each chapter.

Create a second master page template and title it “Chap Body”. Insert guides for where your text boxes will start. Also insert automatic page numbering.

Once your master pages are set up, go back into your actual pages. On the first page (which should be using the A master document as a template), add text boxes for your chapter title and your chapter body. I put my chapter title about halfway down the page, right-aligned, in a 40 point sans serif type. I also aligned it to the bottom of the text box instead of the top or center. This way, whether my chapter title is one line or three, there will be a uniform amount of space between the heading and the body copy.

Once you have the font and spacing the way you want it for the heading, create a paragraph style from it. This way, whenever you add a new chapter, you can just apply this style to the heading without having to redo the settings each time.

In the text box for your chapter body, create two sample paragraphs (I just copied a couple of paragraphs from my book’s Word document for this, though you could also elect to use InDesign’s “Fill with Placeholder Text” option, located under the “Type” menu). You want to create a drop cap for the first paragraph. To do this, go to the Paragraph toolbar (Window -> Type & Tables -> Paragraph). Click the little arrow in the upper right corner to access the options menu and click on the “Drop Caps and Nested Styles” option. From there, you can select how many characters you want in the drop cap (1 is standard) and how many lines you want it to cover (I chose 3). Set the rest of the paragraph in the font and spacing you’d like (at this point I’m using Palatino, 11 point, with 17 point line spacing, though I may change this later). Don’t forget to set your paragraph alignment to justified (don’t set an indent for this first paragraph). Once this is done, set another paragraph style and name is something like “First Paragraph”.

Go to your next paragraph and set the text and spacing to the same as your first paragraph style, but without the drop cap and with a first line indent equivalent to your line spacing (17 points in my case). Reset this paragraph style to your standard “Body” style.

Next, add a two-page spread and label it with your B master document as a template (you can just drag the B master pages down to your layout box to do this). Add a text box for the body on each page. Apply the “Body” style to each of these.

Then, add a text box next to your page numbers on each page. These are for your headers. On the left-hand page should be the title of your book. On the right-hand page you should put the chapter title. When you create each chapter, you can put these in your master documents if you choose, but for now I’ve kept them in the actual page templates. It’s an easy cut-and-paste operation if you want to move them later.

I’ve set my headers to use the same font as my chapter titles, but in a 10 point size. They are aligned in the center of the page, though you could also align them with the inside margin. Create a style called “headers” or something similar for these. Keep your page numbers aligned with the outside margin. Make sure you set your page numbers to the same font and size as your headers.

The last style you’ll need is for your chapter subheadings. I used the same font as my chapter titles, but in a 24 point size instead of 40 points. I also removed the first line indentation so my headings are left-aligned. You might choose to center align your subheads or align them with the outside edge of the page. If you align your subheadings to the outside edge, you’ll need to create two separate styles, one for right-hand pages and one for left-hand pages. Once your subheadings are set up, create a style from these (I named mine “Chapter Subheading”).

If you need additional styles for photo captions or pull quotes, you can add those now. At this point I’m not using them because I’m not that far along with the actual book. When the text is finished and I start laying it out, I may add these in.

The final step is to set your text boxes to flow text from one to the next. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to overfill the text boxes and then just click on the little red “+” that shows up in the lower-right-hand part of the text box. Then you just click on the next text box and watch as the overflowing text appears (it’s not nearly as dramatic as it sounds).

When all of your styles are set, go to File -> Save As and change the type of file to “InDesign Template”. Name your file and save it (I named mine “Chapter Template” so I can keep it seperate from my front matter templates and index templates).

That’s all there is to it! I now have a chapter template at the ready for my completed chapters. The onlly thing I have yet to figure out is formatting bulleted lists in InDesign. I’m considering dropping them entirely just so I don’t have to worry about them! (Or, if you know how to format them, including making the second line align with the beginning of the first line and not the bullet point, please post in the comments below and save me hours of mindless searching to find the answer. Thanks in advance to anyone who knows!)