Baseline grids

Baseline grids are perfect for creating multiple-page layouts that are consistent, professional and appealing. The baseline grid provides you with a series of equally-spaced horizontal guides that make it easy to perfectly cross-align body copy between frames and columns across your whole document.

Before
After

The baseline grid is overlaid over your page to help you align text. A baseline grid can be applied to the entire document or individual text frames within it, and will align baselines across linked or completely separate text frames.

The baseline grid's Grid Spacing option overrides the leading value of frame text. Setting the grid spacing to the same size as your body text leading means that your frame text should snap to, and perfectly align with, the baseline grid. The baseline grid is blue by default but can be any colour you choose.

You can adjust your Document baseline grid for a baseline grid spanning across a whole page, or from the Text Frame panel or Table panel for a baseline grid that has instead been applied only to an individual text frame or table,respectively.

Frame-specific baseline grids are useful for text frames that use a different font sizes (e.g. for caption text, quotes, etc) to the main document's body text, where the frame text will adopt its own independent baseline grid rules and not those of the Document baseline grid.

Settings

The following settings can be adjusted on a baseline grid:

Show Baseline Grid To enable the Baseline Grid:
  1. Do one of the following:
    • On the main toolbar, click Show Baseline Grid.
    • On the View menu, select the equivalent option.
  2. From the dialog, check Use Baseline Grid.
  3. Adjust the position and spacing of your baseline grid.
To hide (show) the baseline grid:
To align text to the baseline grid:
  1. Go to the Paragraph panel.
  2. Click on the Spacing tab.
  3. Ensure that the Align to Baseline Grid checkbox is ticked.
Snapping To snap objects to the baseline grid:
To set up an independent text frame (or table) baseline grid:
  1. On the Window menu, select Text>Text Frame or Table>Table.
  2. On the Baseline Grid section, check Use Independent Baseline Grid.
  3. Adjust the independent grid settings.
To ignore the underlying document baseline grid on text frames and tables:

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