How do you make ruler display ticks every 12 inches instead of every 16 inches?

Question

Hi all,
How do you make ruler display ticks every 12 inches instead of every 16 inches?

Answer 1

I just wish that common features like layers, color, swatches, styles, masks, adjustments, character, paragraph and so on - looked and functioned the same across adobe applications. Is that too much to ask for?
In some cases, that would be absurd. Photoshop and Illustrator are fundamentally differerent environments, as they should be. Photoshop Layers and Illustrator/InDesign Layers are entirely different things, because a vector drawing program works with arranging OBJECTS (raster images, vector paths, text objects) in a Z stacking order and XY position. A Photoshop Layer is essentially just another raster image of the same pixel count as all the others, viewed optionally opaquely or transparently on your screen. It would be ridiculous if Photoshop created a whole new raster image every time you colored another selection of pixels. It would be ridiculous if Illustrator created a new Layer everytime you draw a new path.
Regarding text, Photoshop and Illustrator share the same lame text engine. Illustrator's should be like InDesign's, not like Photoshop's.
And that is a good case-in-point negating the silly defensiveness of Illustrator's outdated and buggy functionality. Illustrator's text handling remains poor today. But it was not updated even to today's treatment until CS 1. For most of its history, its text handling was pathetically primitive compared to that of other programs which were designed for exactly the same purpose and which competed directly with it. Should one "defend" that fact with some nonsensical argument that 'Illustrator is not meant to be a word processor'?
It was not until AI10 that its print dialog acquired a simple Fit To Page command. You had to manually figure and enter a scale factor, and that was limited on the low end to 25%. Can that logically be "defended" on the basis that 'AI is not an imagesetter'? Every dang software on the planet provides a Fit To Page print option!
This "It's not a technical illustration program" argument is every bit as nonsensical. Every one of Illustrator's direct competitors provides for user-defined drawing scales, and has for decades. Illustrator is just as "technical" a drawing program as those others are. It's just particularly lame at it in this regard. And since when is "technical" illustration not "illustration"? And since when is user-defined drawing scale only needed for "technical" illustration? Absolutely ridiculous.
So what if in its infancy Illustrator was a tool for PostScript workflow? Illustrator's leading competitor for most of its history, FreeHand, was initially based on the path drawing engine of a font design software. But when it went to market as a general illustration tool, it blew the functional and interface doors off Illustrator, and continued to do so throughout its history.
The simple fact is this: Throughout its history, Illustrator never kept up with the basic drawing features, interface refinements, and performance of its direct competitors. Its market share is primarily due to its carrying an Adobe label--and to the absurd defensiveness of too many of its users who have next to no experience with anything else.
Ilustrator, Indesign and Photoshop share about 90% of the same functionality.
Where do you get that?
Photoshop's primary purpose is fine-tuning of raster imagery, especially photography. You don't do sophisticated color correction, channel operations, sharpening, etc., in Illustrator or InDesign. That's what I would call its "90% functionality."
InDesign's primary purose is automation of repetitive assembly tasks and text handling in high page-count documents. You don't do master pages, indexes, tables of contents, constant spooling the hard disk, hundreds of externally linked raster and vector files, chapters-long threaded text stories in Illustrator or Photoshop. That's what I would call its "90% functionality."
Illustrator's primary purpose is general-purpose vector drawing (which most certainly includes many kinds of 'technical' illustration) using cubic Bezier curves, and page-assembly for low page-count, illustration-intensive documents. That's what I would call its "90% functionality."
Now ask yourself: Should programs fundamentally structured for different primary purposes necessarily share the same interface? I say no, not necessarily. Example: The mere use of the same term (Layers) in Photoshop and Illustrator for what are fundamentally two different things has led to a gross misunderstanding on the part of Photoshop users who are Illustrator beginners, which is repeated here in this very forum almost every day.
Ask yourself this: Should unyielding adherance to the organizational dictates of Adobe's so-called "unified" interface be allowed to result in a palette flyout menu in InDesign that contains only one option? Is the very concept of a 'menu' not fundametally antithetical to a single choice? Is that not just poor interface design, regardless of whether it "matches" that of the other programs in the so-called "suite"? (Frankly, I find Adobe's over-use of flyout menus--which effectively HIDE important options--generally both ill-conceived and poorly executed.)
No, there simply is no excuse for Illusrator's still lacking user-defined drawing scales, just as there was no excuse for its lacking multiple pages for two full decades, just as there is no excuse for its still lacking reliable snaps, connector lines, live shape primitives (!), proper arc-drawing, proper corner rounding, inline graphics, auto-fitting textframes, the ability to join multiple paths at once, (note that NONE of those can be called specifically "technical" drawing features) and a plethora of other functions that are bare-bones basic to vector drawing. The programs is just archaic and outdated in all these regards, and that's all there is to it.
JET