Lessons
Class Introduction
01:51 2Document Set-Up
15:39 3Panels
11:46 4Toolbox
08:22 5The Adobe® Workspace
05:17 6Shortcuts
05:33 7Saving Files
05:37 8Guides
12:42Text Frames
08:13 10Shapes, Fill and Stoke
07:43 11Arranging and Modifying Shapes
08:31 12The Pen Tool: Drawing, Stroke and Fill
06:52 13The Pen Tool: Handles and Anchor Points
08:27 14Pencil, Smooth and Erase Tools
05:46 15Strokes and Arrows
13:33 16Importing Shapes from Adobe® Illustrator®
08:57 17Placing Graphics
08:05 18Placing PDFs
04:22 19Placing Multiple Files
06:14 20Frames: Fitting and Manipulating
07:28 21Specialty Frames
05:52 22The Links Panel
21:34 23High Quality Display
06:48 24Clipping Paths
13:08 25Transparency
09:41 26The Gap Tool
03:55 27Color & Swatches Panels Basics
16:38 28Eyedropper Tool
10:03 29Gradient Swatches
05:31 30Character Panel
23:38 31Paragraph Panel
15:09 32Spelling & Autocorrect
06:42 33Text Frame Options
08:10 34Printing and Exporting
16:16Lesson Info
Text Frame Options
So, so far we've been entering text and we've been modifying text that's already here. But what I wanna do is actually bring in some text from elsewhere. So I'm going to create a new page in the same document and I'm going to go ahead and create a text frame, and then I'm going to have my cursor already sitting in that text frame, and I do wanna turn off my placeholder text - I'm sorry, that's not what I wanted to do. I wanna turn off my hidden characters - that's what I'm meant to do. I don't wanna see all that because as I type every little hidden character shows up. I've got a text frame, I've got my cursor sitting in it, it's blinking, it's ready to go, ready for me to put some text in there. So I'm going to do File + Place just like when we placed images and we placed a PDF, I'm gonna bring that in there, and I'm gonna go ahead and choose this, a Rich Text File, which has a little bit of styling in it. In fact I'm gonna go out to the Finder and we're gonna look at that. I'm just g...
onna see what this letter looks like. I'm gonna click on that and then I'm going to just do a quick a screen (mumbles), I forgot, where you just quick view it - that's it - just wanna look at it and see that I have some bolding applied to it, and I've got a couple different paragraphs here as well. So I have that ready. This is what we're going to import in. So it's that letter that's here. I do wanna show my import options and I also wanna replace my selected item. My cursor's already sitting there waiting for text and I'd like text to auto-fill into there. So Show Import Options gives us the option of picking and choosing what actually gets fed in there. I'm gonna leave everything on in the top that's on, so include all that stuff and the typographer's quotes as well. But here's where I decide what to do with the styling that's in here and in this case, I wanna remove any styles and formatting that may be in there. If they've decided to use text styles and table styles, I wanna strip that out because I wanna be in control of the styling that's there. I generally find that when I get text from elsewhere and people have styled it, maybe they didn't know what they were doing or they were inconsistent, or they just work in a different way than I'm used to working, and I wanna make sure that I kinda have control over that. But I am also going to leave Preserve Local Overrides on and what that does is if they bolded something like we saw that they had, it will remain intact when I bring that into my file. So I'm gonna remove the styles, preserve the local overrides, and then if I want, if I've done a lot of things in here, and I haven't done much, but if I have I can save that preset so next time I bring in a letter from the same person, they email me stuff all the time for their annual reports or whatever, I wanna make sure that I have that saved. I can save that preset and then just choose it from the pull-down menu next time. So I'm gonna do that, say okay, and it's gonna automatically put it inside this box that was here already, inside this frame, cause it had cursor sitting there and told it to replace that. Now, we didn't get other space before and after, none of that's there, we have to set all that up. Again if we had had styles set up we could just add that, but we need to do that manually here in this case. So the first thing I wanna do, it knows there's paragraph breaks here; it's definitely added them. In fact if I turned on my hidden characters, I can see that there are paragraph breaks there, it's just that there's no space before or after that. So I wanna turn that back off, those hidden characters, and then I want to go back into the paragraph settings and tell it space after. So we'll do that, give us that little bit of breathing room. Maybe I wanna bring in my right margin a little bit, my left margin a little bit, and maybe we save this so that it is actually justified text. So I bring that in and now I've got that, and I notice this is on the same line. I don't want that, I want that on a new line, so I'm gonna delete my space. Now I wanna do that soft-return which is a Shift + Return instead of that hole and now you notice what happened across the board here, because I said justify and when I hit Return, it did justify it and all it can do on justified text with the last line like that is that it justified it across the board, and put space in between. So I don't want that. I'm gonna come in here until at this last line is actually left justified. So that looks pretty good. So that's how we bring it in. When we bring in text from somewhere else, we just go ahead and flow it in that way. Now if I don't have a text frame at all, let's create a new page here, I don't have one at all, nothing's selected on my page, I'm gonna go up to File and Place, choose that same document, and doesn't matter if we replace selected item cause I don't have anything actually selected, and now I have a loaded place cursor like I did when I had images, but now it's full of text. So now because as I said at the very beginning of the course, I said that everything has to live in a container. Well before I had a text container and I flowed text in, now I have text, but I need to create one on the fly, and much like when we placed an image and it created an image frame on the fly, this one when I click and drag it will actually create a text frame, and fill it with the text that we have there. And again, the formatting isn't done that I need to do but it's there, and I have the text frame all ready for it, and go ahead and put in everything we just learned. Grab a new font, just maybe choose one from here, and then I'm gonna go ahead and change the letting a little bit, and we'll also change the styling here. We'll go ahead and put it (mumbles) left, actually let's just left justify the whole thing, and I'm also going to put in a little bit of space after to give myself some breathing room there. So I have that text ready to go but again, it created that text frame for me, I didn't have to worry about setting up ahead of time, I just clicked and dragged for it to, for it to set up where I needed it to. And again, it doesn't matter what size I make it, it's just as I bring that in, if I do the same thing, do a place Command or Control + D to place, and choose okay, I can make it even if I wanted a really skinny text frame like that, and there it is, it's all placed in there ready for me to start styling that. So there's a lot of different ways to get text inside InDesign. Like I said you can enter it yourself, you can use placeholder text, you can bring in text from somewhere else into an existing frame, or you can create a frame on the fly when you bring in text from other file formats; Rich Text Formats, Word Formats, et cetera. Alright so that's text, how we get some simple text in there, we moved text frames around just like we do any of the other frames. You know we manipulated the handles on the object frames and now we're doing the same thing on the text frames, and we can start laying out all our text and everything together. So we have a text frame here and I'm gonna snap it into a guide. I have a text frame here and it's gonna snap to the guide. We've got guides over to the right and I have these images that I placed. I may have used Smart Guides to line them up to make them the same size - we did that in an earlier segment - and then I grouped them together just so that I can move them together easily, and they also snap into these guides. And create this frame here, this is just a rectangle, and then we've just filled it with a color. And the same thing over here and in this case, I actually have some colored frames that sit on top of some images back here that are possibly black and white, and they just have transparency applied to them so they're really kind of just, just a shadow of themselves there, and then I've got these images on top just so they kind of mix together and blend together. I've got a nice two column text frame here, I've got an image here, and we made sure that it comes out to the bleed mark so that when we print it, and we trim it back to size which is the black line, we'll trim off all that bleed that's there as well.
Ratings and Reviews
Susan
Fantastic course. I have used Illustrator and photoshop, but learned when under tight deadlines. We are going to begin using inDesign to publish a more extensive multipage newsletter, and I wanted to build a better knowledge foundation of this tool, rather than just diving in. The course was comprehensive and I feel that I'll be able to make a better product after taking the course.
Terri
Have loved Erica since I was a baby designer. She is a great educator, and even though I have been using ID for about 8 years, I just changed from CS6 to CC. This was a great refresher as well as a mental upgrade to new options and effects.
Gilbert Beltran
I enjoyed these classes. Learned the Indesign toolbox and picked up a few smart tricks. Erica is great at keeping up the pace and being very clear and easy to follow.
Student Work
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