InDesign: Set Up A Baseline Grid

How many times have you flicked throught a newspaper or magazine and noticed that text is not lining up across columns? While this is not a deal breaker it's ugly and lazy work, especially when it's so easy to set up a baseline grid and correct this problem.

Setting up a baseline grid is something that I normally do at the very start of a publishing project. A lot of designers try this and get deterred by the fact that their leading (line spacing) values tend to mess up. This occurs because InDesign's default baseline grid is set to 4.233mm (in other words 12pt or 1 pica) and if your leading happens to be more than this you end up aligning your text to every other line on the baseline grid. Too many designers get this far and then give up.

The solution is simplicity itself:

1. Set your leading and make a note of what is.

2. Go to InDesign > Preferences > Grids... and set the Grid's 'Start' value to whatever your top margin is for the page. Next set the 'Increment Every:' to whatever your leading happens to be. Make sure that you include whatever measurement unit that you are using (i.e. if you are using pts then type '14pt' into the field).

3. Finally, select your type and in the paragraph pane of the control panel hit the 'Align To Baseline Grid' button (even better if you can do this in the paragraph style sheets dialogue box).

Now you're up and running...