InDesign

About automatic layout adjustment

If you use the Document Setup or Margins and Columns commands to make changes to an existing layout, such as altering column widths or page orientation, you could spend considerable time and effort in rearranging objects to fit the new layout. The Layout Adjustment feature can do much of that work automatically. For example, you can quickly reformat a wide four-column document designed for an A4-size page to a tall two-column format on a U.S. legal-size page. With Layout Adjustment, text and graphics frames are moved and resized as necessary based on the new relative positions of column guides, page margins, and page edges.

Note: Dragging column guides does not trigger layout adjustment.

The Layout Adjustment feature produces more predictable results when a layout is tightly based on a framework of margins, page columns, and ruler guides, and where objects are snapped to guides. Results are less predictable when objects don’t adhere to margins, columns, and guides, or when extraneous ruler and column guides clutter a page. Layout adjustment is not affected by the document grid or the baseline grid.

Page designed vertically, for print (left); page orientation changed for on‑screen viewing, with layout automatically refitted by the Layout Adjustment feature (right)

You can modify the rules in the Layout Adjustment dialog box. The Layout Adjustment feature attempts to approximate the proportions of the old layout in the new layout by doing the following:

  • Repositioning margin guides while maintaining margin widths, if the page size changes moving column and ruler guides to maintain proportional distances from page edges, margins, or column guides.

  • Adding or removing column guides, if the new layout specifies a different number of columns.

  • Moving objects already aligned to any margin, column, or ruler guide, or to any two guides perpendicular to each other, so that the objects stay with those guides if the guides move during layout adjustment.

  • Proportionally resizing objects already aligned to two parallel margin, column, or ruler guides or to guides on three sides, so that the objects stay with those guides if the guides move during layout adjustment.

  • Maintain the relative position of objects that are anchored to the text as specified in the Anchored Object Options dialog box.

  • Moving objects to keep them in the same relative position on the page, if the page size changes.

Note: Layout Adjustment affects columns inside a text frame differently than it does page columns. If the frame itself is resized by Layout Adjustment and the Fixed Column Width is not selected in the Object > Text Frame Options dialog box, text frame columns are resized proportionally. If the Fixed Column Width option is selected, columns are added or removed as necessary.