Adobe InDesign CS4: Making Multiple Objects the Same Size

N.B: I am not a graphic designer; from time-to-time clients ask me to whip up posters & other print material. I know enough about InDesign to get around and produce relevant materials, but I am by no means an expert.

One of the things I was struggling to do recently was to resize multiple objects to the same height & width.

I was creating a calendar for a client and set it up with tables containing the numbered days of the month and then had textboxes above the table on some dates that had an event occurring.

Throughout the build process, I just created textbox objects where necessary thinking that I could resize one to the correct size and duplicate it on all other objects. Unfortunately, this wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be.

Here’s a screenshot of a similar scenario. There are three textboxes each with different sizes. I want all of them to be the same height and width.

My first thought was to select all the objects and manually change the Width and Height properties to the same values (12p square). But it gave me this result:

What happened was that InDesign resized all selected objects into the 12p x 12p dimensions I indicated.

I was resigned to possibly having to manually set the height/width for all objects or to create guides and snap all objects to the guides, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

I did some more digging and discovered the “Transform Again” menu item. This function will re-transform another object based on the previous transformation applied.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. I selected one textbox and set the width & height
2. Then I selected all the other objects and chose the “Object > Transform Again > Transform Sequence Again Individually” menu option.
3. This applied the transformation to all objects on the page – not as a group like in the initial attempt, but to each selected object one-by-one (aka individually).

After that, all I needed to do was to align/distribute the objects appropriately and celebrate this small victory.