Creating a New Document

Creating a New Document

To create a new document,

1. Choose File > New in the menu bar. (or) Press Ctrl + N in the keyboard. Now Document Setup dialog box appears.(Figure 1.3)

2. Enter the appropriate settings for your new document in the Document Setup dialog box.

3. Click on OK button.

Now a new document called Untitled - 1 opens on the screen as shown in Figure 1.4.

A document page is displayed within a dark border. The area outside of the dark border is referred to as the Pasteboard. Anything that is placed completely in the pasteboard is not visible when you print the document. You can use the pasteboard to temporarily hold elements while designing your document.

The main components of the above window are Title bar, Menu bar, Toolbar, Ruler, Scroll bars and Text area. Let us have a look at these components.

Title bar

It is the topmost part of the window. It shows the name of the software and the name of the document at the left, and the control buttons (Minimize, Maximize and Close) at the right.

In Figure 1.5 we can see the name of the software (Adobe PageMaker 7.0) at the left. It is followed by the default name of the document(Untitled-1) which can be changed when we save the document with a user-supplied name. We know that on clicking the Minimize button the document window is minimised to a small icon and kept in the task bar, Maximise button is used for maximising the current document window to fit the whole screen area, and the Close button closes the software itself.

Menu bar

It contains the following menus File, Edit, Layout, Type, Element, Utilities, View, Window, Help. When you click on a menu item, a pulldown menu appears. There may be sub-menus under certain options in the pull-down menus.

Toolbar

If you place the mouse pointer on a button in the Toolbar, a short text will appear as its description called ‘Tool Tip

Toolbox

The Figure 1.8 shows the PageMaker toolbox.

To move the Toolbox, drag the Toolbox by its Title bar. Select a tool from the default toolbox by clicking it.

If the Toolbox is not available on the screen, you can perform these steps to show the toolbox.

1. Click on Window. The Window menu will appear.

2. Click on Show tools.

The toolbox appears in front of your document window. If you want to hide the toolbar, you can perform these steps to hide the toolbox.                                   

1. Click on Window. The Window menu will appear.

2. Click on Hide tools to hide the toolbox.

The Keyboard shortcuts and Toolbox usages are shown in Table 1.1 & Table 1.2

Scroll bars

Scrolling is the process of moving up and down or left and right through the document window. There are two scroll bars namely Vertical and Horizontal scroll bars for scrolling the document vertically or horizontally.

Rulers

There are two ruler. One is at the top and the other is at the left side.

To show the ruler

1. Click on View. The View menu will appear.

2. Click on Show Rulers. Rulers appear along the top and left sides of the document window.

To hide the ruler

1. Click on View. The View menu will appear.

2. Click on Hide Rulers to hide the rulers.