TEXT

Working with text in InDesign is very similar to XPress. You can double click to select a word, triple click to select a line of type, four clicks to select a paragraph, and 5 clicks to select the entire story.

You need to select text with the text tool in order to make modifications to it.

In XPress, you need to create a text box before you can type anything.

In InDesign, you need to create a frame. The easiest way to create a frame is to select the text tool and click and drag a rectangle in the shape and size you want. Then just start typing—a bit faster than XPress.

You can also create a text frame by selecting a frame tool and dragging the desired shape and size.

Either way, a text frame has several control points that dictate its position, size, and text flow.

To link text from one frame to another, select or toggle to your selection tool (solid arrow) and make the text frame active. Then click on the plus sign.

Your cursor will change to a manual text flow icon. Move the icon to another place in your document (use the space bar to get to another page) and click, or click and drag.

Clicking will create a text frame that fills the page from the point where you clicked. Clicking and dragging allows you to position and size the frame. Once you let go of the cursor, your text will flow into the new space.

You can control how text flows by using the control or shift keys.

To have it flow just into one column and stop, even if that column isn’t big enough to hold all the text, just click in that column (or click and drag to create one).

If you want to create more than one column at a time, hold the control key (semiautomatic text flow). You can then click or click and drag as many times as you want to, to place the text in multiple columns.

Using automatic text flow creates all the columns of text InDesign needs to display all the text—it will even automatically add pages to the document to accommodate the text. Hold the shift key when clicking to get the auto flow option.

If you haven’t specified any column guides in your document, auto flow will create text frames that span the width of your page. If you’ve created or modified a document to include more than one column, auto flow fills them one by one.

If you’re importing text into InDesign from Microsoft Word (for instance), you’ll be presented with themanual text flow icon (above). You can choose to flow it manually (just click or click and drag), semi-automatically (hold the option key and click or click and drag), or automatically (hold the shift key and click).

It’s quite impressive, and very reminiscent of PageMaker.

As you may have noticed, there is a “jabber” feature attached to InDesign, so you can create text blocks without actually having any type. Select a text frame and choose “fill with placeholder text” from the Type menu.

While it’s unlikely that you will be importing text at this point, you should know how to do it. Simply choose “place” from the File menu and locate the text file. InDesign recognizes multiple text formats including Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as text-only files (ASCII or Unicode), and RTF files.

Note that you have some choices to make at the bottom of the place dialog box: if you check “retain format” any character and paragraph settings that were made in the file will be transferred into InDesign: if you deselect it, all formatting will be lost. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a decision you get to make.

“Convert quotes” should always be checked. This takes any foot and/or inch marks and changes them into quotes and apostrophes.

“Replace selected item” replaces the text in a selected text frame, or any selected text. If there’s nothing selected, you’ll get the text flow icon after clicking “choose.”

There’s also a “show import options” option. Choose to use the formatting of the text file, or use the formatting styles you created in InDesign.

Once you’ve selected the text file, your cursor will change into the text flow icon. You can click and drag a bounding box, or click inside an existing text frame.

Use the option key to continue creating text frames, or the shift key to place all the text at once. NOTE: if a Microsoft Word document was saved with the “fast save” preference active, you may not get what you expect!

InDesign creates a link to the original text file, so that if that file is changed at any point, those changes are updated in the InDesign document. This isn’t always a good idea. Use the link palette to break the link.

note the import options at the bottom of the "place" dialog box for importing text...

check "show import options" for more choices...

FORMATTING TYPE

You have to have something selected before you can format it. Or you can make your formatting decisions before typing anything and those specifications will be applied to whatever your type next.

Either way, how you format text can occur at multiple levels in InDesign.

The Type menu is one of the most obvious, if not most efficient option. Select your font and point size from this menu.

Selecting “character” or “paragraph” will open the character and paragraph palettes.

The good news about how InDesign deals with fonts is that you can’t ever choose a style that isn’t already designed to be a part of the font family—unlike XPress where pressing the “B” in the measurements palette makes you think you’re actually going to get a bold version of your typeface.

Notice that leading occurs at the character level, rather than the paragraph level. If you’ve turned off “apply leading to entire paragraph” in your prefs, you could have some problems: make sure you select an entire paragraph before changing the leading, otherwise you’ll get weird line spacing.

Likewise, if you leave leading set to “auto” (which of course you’d never do), InDesign will use the largest point size used in a line to determine the leading for that line.

You can always select a paragraph and adjust the leading using option and up arrow to tighten it, and option and down arrow to loosen it.

Note also that kerning and tracking are two separate features.

To kern a paragraph, you have to select it first. At that point, either type in the amount of kerning you want (in thousandths of an em) or use the arrows, or, choose an amount from the popup menu. If you use the up and down arrows, you’ll be moving things in increments of 10. Of course, my favorite way is to use the keystroke shortcut: option and left arrow to tighten spacing, and option and right arrow to loosen it.

Vertical and horizontal scale distort the design of a font. It’s bad design to manipulate type like this, although I’ve been known to allow a 10% shift in scale from time to time. If you want a condensed face, choose on. Likewise with a wider font.

Likewise, skewing text for a special effect is fine, but don’t use it to try to create italics for a font that doesn’t have an italic version.

The character palette has a submenu that offers additional choices in formatting. Select the type you want to affect first.

Another word of caution: choosing small caps will usually create small, thinner versions of your typeface, unless your font has small caps characters included.

You won’t find an “outline” or “drop shadow” option here, though, because InDesign (an Adobe product) has integrated, very cool Illustrator and Photoshop features to make those things happen.

don't skew type... use an italic font instead

Any selected text can be made into outlines: just choose it from the Type menu. Once you’ve created outlines, you won’t be able to edit the text.

Once you’ve created outline, the only visible difference will be the bounding box surrounding the type looks smaller. If you select the type using the direct selection tool (hollow arrow) you’ll see the actual control points that create each character.

Use the direct selection tool to distort the letters (if you really must).

Use the colors palette to create outlines by setting the fill to “none” and the stroke to whatever color you please. Use the stroke palette to determine the weight of the outline.

But there’s more! Once you’ve turned text into outlines, you can paste images into them.

Select the text using the selection tool and select “place” from the File menu to locate the image you want to use Once you click “choose” the image is pasted into the letters.

If you haven’t selected the text first, you’ll get a paintbrush icon. Just click somewhere inside the outlined text and InDesign pastes the image into the characters. Very cool.

If you want a drop shadow around your text, use the “drop shadow” option from the Object menu. First check the “drop shadow” box at the top, then determine your mode, opacity, offset and blur options. You can type your offset values as inches or points (p2, for example).

The “blur” option is a bit tricky. If you don’t want a blur that goes all over the place, choose a very small number.

The default color for a drop shadow is black. But you can choose any other color you want, including mixing your own by choosing “CMYK” from the color field.

Don’t get too carried away, though. Even though these features are nice to work with, you can create some pretty ugly typography with them.

And of course you can create type on a path just the way you do in Illustrator: draw the path, then use the path text tool to create your text.

Use the “type on a path” options under the Type menu to mess around with alignment and other aspects.

Paragraph formatting occurs in the paragraph palette. You don’t have to select an entire paragraph to make changes to it—your cursor just has to be somewhere inside the paragraph you want to affect.

From left to right, the paragraph alignment options are flush left, centered and flush right. To the right of those are the justified options.

Left indent refers to the left margin alignment. Only change this if you want to create a “hanging” first line, or if you’re quoting a long passage. And the right indent moves the right margin of your paragraph in (towards the left).

The first line indent creates space at the beginning of a paragraph.

Under the right indent field is a funky little thing that refers to aligning a paragraph with the baseline grid. You established a baseline grid in your preferences. If you select the right icon, your text frames will bounce around until the baselines of your text align with that grid, and if your baseline grid doesn’t match the leading you’re using, watch out!

Space before and after refer to space in addition to leading that will occur when you start and/or end a paragraph (that is, when you hit the return key). Choose one or the other, not both!

Drop caps are created using the paragraph palette as well. Place your text cursor within a paragraph first, and then use the bottom left field to specify the number of lines the cap should drop, and the right pane to determine how many letters should become drop caps.

Select the drop cap(s) to change the font and point size (using the character palette). Note that enlarging the cap raises it above the cap height of the first line. You may need to add additional line space between paragraphs to accommodate it.

And of course you can turn a drop cap into outlines. And add a shadow (if you must). (The D in this example has no fill, so you can see the drop shadow inside the letter as well as outside. I also adjusted the kerning between the D and the u to create some additional space.)

There may be times when you need to deal with tabs (but never to indent a paragraph, of course!). InDesign treats tabs much the way XPress does, with a dialog box where you click to place tabs where you want them along a ruler. The only difference is that this box pops up wherever it wants to and may have no relation to the text frame you’re dealing with. The trick is to move the box to the top of your frame, then you can optically set the tabs.

Move existing tabs by clicking and dragging them left or right. Delete them by dragging them off the ruler.

Type that follows the contour of an image is called "runaround" type. InDesign calls it "text wrap" and the palette that controls it is under the Window menu, in a submeu next to "type & tables " towards the bottom of the list.

Select the image object, and then click the type of wrap you want.