Creating a New Document

Choose File > New Document to display the New Document dialog.

To change the page size and orientation, click the Change button to open the standard macOS Page Setup dialog. You can select a standard page size, or select/create a named custom size.

Select the number of document pages. You can add more pages later using the Page & Spread Inspector, Thumbnails window, Edit menu, or contextual menu (with no current selection).

Select the Spread Editing option (also known as facing pages) if your document design is to be based on double page spreads, in which images and text are allowed to span the page divide. Selecting Spread Editing will also provide Inside and Outside page margin settings (replacing the Left and Right margin settings). Producing a glossy magazine or brochure are typical examples of documents for which the Spread Editing option might be selected.

Set more options, if required (see below for information).

Click the Create button to create the new document.

Click the More Options button to display extra controls for adding default text containers and for setting the document page margins.

To add a default text container to each page, select the Create checkbox. Select the Link Together checkbox to link all of the text containers together in page order sequence.

Default text containers are sized to the page margins.

The settings for Number of Columns and Gutter Width are applied to all of the default text containers. You can change these settings later for any individual text container using the Text Column Inspector.

The page margin settings are applied document wide and can be changed later using the Document Inspector. If your document is comprised of a series of single pages, you will be offered Left and Right margin settings, whereas for spread edited documents these will be replaced by Inside and Outside settings.

Bleed refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet before trimming. Bleed and crop marks can be setup via the Document Inspector.