Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Text Part 1

We'll start really simple with the really basic stuff when it comes to placing and working with text in your in design documents. It's like what you might expect, you grab the type tool, which the keyboard shortcut is tv big surprise there for type tool, and then you just click and you drag out a text frame and the new type stuff, so we can say hello, internet friends hey, um so now I've typed something in this box, and right now we still see that the cursors flashing at me, so that means it's waiting for me to keep typing or get out of the box, so to get out of the box, I can come over here and click the selection tool. I can't do what I always do it by accident, which is use the keyboard shortcut for the selection tool, right? So I press v what's going to happen? I'm not going to get the selection tool, I'm going to get a b in my text, which is, I don't know, I do that a lot, so when I'm proof reading my documents, I find these everywhere because it's just a mistake that I make a lot...

, so to avoid making that mistake instead, what you'd want to do is just press the escape key and that's actually going to get you back to your selection tool and get your cursor out of the box and then you can go about your business so this is really small type so you probably can't even really see it on your screen right now so we can make it bigger in a couple of ways I could go back to my type tool and highlight this as you would expect in microsoft word or any other program where you work with type often you have to highlight it and then make your adjustments so with the type tool active and this highlighted I can come up to the control panel and here's where I can change my type face my point size etcetera so let's say instead of minion pro let's use the fun that I've recently fell in love with called mr happy on I'll talk to you about where you could get fun some of my favorite sources for funds but we'll just go with mr happy regular so that's going to change the typeface there and then here's the size so I can choose any one of these presets or of course I could come in here and type my own number like maybe I know somehow that I really need sixty three point font and when I press enter its goingto make the adjustment so those air like the basics right you draw boxy type in it you can change the typeface you can change the point size over here I could of course, changed the color. I could go over to the swatches panel and here then when I thought the text highlighted, then we see a little tea in me phil swatch right here. So if I want to change, you know here's these great default colors again, eh? So I can make these whatever colors I want. Maybe we'll make whoops will make this green and that can be blue. There we go. This blue awesome. So you could do that or check this out if I go back to instead of having my cursor in here if I go back to my selection tool and I just have the box selected, then I can still actually change the colors. But if I for example, if I come back to my swatch panel and I just hit like this color down here I am filling the frame, right? Not the text. So I'm gonna undo that if I want to now select the tax because it's not highlighted with my cursor I can come over here and click the tea and that tells in design I want to change the type color so then I could come in and be like, all right, I really want all of this to be blue or whatever so that's kind of handy, um, same thing with the fonts and stuff, so if I have this box selected and then I get my type tool, I don't have to act click, click and highlight change the font as long as the box is selected and I have my type tool, I could come up here and just, you know, get something else if I want so that's kind of anything, but when you work with type it's also really handy to be able to just I think visually adjust things because I never know what point size I need my type to be. I just need to see how big it is. So a couple of ways that you can just do that visually one is kind of like your images if you now I have to think about it. Yeah, if you control or command shift drag, you can scale it the same way you would scale your image and a frame. You khun scale the type and you'll see when you highlight the text it's still going to be changed up here so it'll show you its actual new size. So that's kind of neat, and then the other thing is, if you highlight the tax like this you can actually use keyboard shortcuts and this is kind of like that convenient one so it's the whole left side of your keyboard and then the greater that are less than and that will actually not scale the box but it'll scale the text within it on dh it does it in ten point increments so it's a way to quickly just boost of the tax air, scale it down and it's just kind of nice. So those are like the super basics of just putting text out on your page on dh the nice thing about it is because it's in a frame if I drag using the selection tool over here if I drag to re adjust my frame it's gonna flow the text down so it's actually gonna rap that text down like this. So in photo shop sometimes one of the ways that you could make texan photo shop is to just click and then you get run on text that just goes forever and it doesn't actually wrap button in design and you drop box because your text is gonna live in a frame. Um and it would be a really long frame if you wanted to just run on or it'll be something more like this and the text will just rap down so that's kinda nice another thing that you can do is put text within a shape or instead of just drawing a frame out like this, maybe we want our text to be in a circle so I can draw circle so I'm using the ellipse let me go back I didn't explain that at all did I eso underneath the rectangle frame tool if you click and hold you get this fly out so there's other tools that are nested just like many of the other adobe applications you may see one tool here, but if you click and hold on it you find out it's not just one tool it's a family of tools and this family has three members the rectangle frame tool that we've been working with the ellipse frame tool and the polygon frame tool so if I want the ellipse frame tool, I'm just going to move my mouse here and then release and I'll get the ellipse frame tool and that lets me draw eclipsys ellipses, whatever the plural is, but if I want a perfect circle, I'm gonna hold downshift and that gives me this nice circle and, um, I can't see it because I'm in wonderful mode, so I'll press w to get out of wonderful mood and um let's put some text in this frame, so now that I've got the circle drawn, I'll get my type tool by pressing team and now we see that this cursor has this little circle around it so if I click here I would be clicking and drawing a box but when I move my krister in here it tells me I'm about to put text in this shape so if I click within their I can start typing and it's goingto run down and fill this shape and I could sit here and type gibberish all day for you until I fill this frame but thankfully there's something within in design called police hold her type because when you're building layouts a lot of time if you're building layouts for other people like in an office environment maybe you're in charge of the newsletter so you're building a layout but you don't actually have the content but you want to be able to see what it looks like so you can actually just fill it fill a text frame with placeholder text and the way that you do that is you come up to the type of men you and you choose fill with placeholder text and then it will just fill it with what's called laura mips um which is just gibberish that looks kind of normal until you look closely then you realize it's different but eh so now we have text in the sheep and it's fully editable and if we go backto wonderful mood we don't even have to see the frame and we have this neat um ball of text so that's how you put text in a frame but of course you can also put text on the frame so if I go back to the type tool and I click and hold I can come down here to the type on a path tool and when I get that I get this goofy looking cursor that's like um that little thing is called the ibm can you zoom in on this? Yeah, that helps right? So there you see the I beam only instead of a box it have like the wave going on which really represents a path so it's saying hey, I'm text that goes on a path so it's giving me the little wavy path icon because I'm hovering close to this circle so when I put my cursor here and I click oops let's get out of wonderful mood how about it and let's get out of my crazy zoom that I have going on there we are so um when I click here I can now type on a path where is it? You okay? So this is reality. I hate teaching type on a path because I do this all the time, but this is real life. So this is what happens I put type on a path and none of it shows because basically it's bushed between these bookends so when you put type on a path you wherever you click your in theory telling in design, I want type here and then it's going to like, run around your shape and then there there's another book ends that happens at the end and for some reason I always get ambushed on top of each other so it'd fix that I'm going to use the selection tool I'm gonna come over here and dragged these apart come on you see it's a little picky there we go we and we'll back it up okay? So in the real world when this happens to you and it will this is how you fix it. So now you have type on a path so now I can keep typing la dee dah la dee da and let's make it bigger so I'm going to command a to select it all just like in microsoft word or even in your email and we'll do that left hand side of the keyboard with the greater than keys and it's going to run into the book end here. So this little plus sign that we see tells us that we have too much text then space allows, so I need to make more space so I'm going to click and drag this bookend over here so we give it room to run around the path so let's, look at how this looks like when we select this we see the frame around the circle we see the text within that frame then we see this little book end right here on the text going from it and then this is the book ends that marks the end so if I type text that runs into this book and I am it's going to be not visible anymore so this is like the end of the path of text kind the nice thing is using the selection tool I can rotate this so if I look at this and I'm like hey that's cool but like I need to spin it around so maybe it starts up here if I grab this little guy and pull see how it rotates the opposite side see how this left side it's hard to see I know but as I'm pulling this if I go up here when I let go the type will now start so opposite from the book ends is this little thing let's try to zoom in on that can you see it it's this little biddy bloo mini book end it's like your center point so you can grab this and click to spin see the book ends they're moving as I pull on this so I can spin the text that way another thing I can do with this little centerpoint thing is if I click and drag it across the circle to the inside I can flip the text to be inside the circle because sometimes you need that uh so it really just depends what you're doing and I'll just click and pull it back out to flip the text back on the outside so again that wass we drew a path and then I used the type on the past tool to put text on the path then to alter where it starts and how it flows and all that, then you use the selection tool and you gotta really you gotta really be specific you can see when you when you're near the bookends, do you see other cursor changes? Zoom in again. So when I'm hovering over this, I get that little left arrow kind of thing underneath so that's showing me that that's the end bookend and this is the starting one, so when you see that under your cursor that's, how you know that you're in the right spot to be able to grab that stuff time so that's kind of nifty another thing that we can do while we're here and we're talking about text in these shapes is when I look at this now that we've put this is kind of a crazy example with text in the circle text on the circle if I wanted to create more separation between those two things because they're kind of too close together, I think we have a few options, so if I want to put my cursor inside this text frame I'm going to right click and choose text frame options and now I can actually change this inset spacing so I'm going to click the preview down here in the bottom because guess what it's really handy when you can see what you're doing? I don't know what spacing looks like until I see it so it's really handy to turn on the previews and then I'm going to come up here where it says inset spacing and I'm gonna right now it's at zero, which means the text is pushed up against the edges of that circle but if I went a little more breathing room so I'm gonna take the text and say, hey, bring it in a little I'm going to start nudging this upwards and you can see that the text now shrinks in away from that edge so we have a little more breathing room, which is kind of nice um on the path here, the text that's going around the circle if I wanted to move that up or down then I would be doing a baseline shift adjustment so I'd highlight this text and then up in the control panel right here this is my baseline shift so right now it's set to zero, which means the text is sitting right full in the path but sometimes when you're working with text on a path especially it's handy to move it up we're down a little bit so I want to move it up I can just click right here and it's going to expand it up or if I want to bring it down for some reason I can bring it down you have a lot of options to really be able to play with all this stuff and of course it's hard to tell what it looks like with all the these blue lines and margins and icons and paths on your screen, which is why wonderful modus so great or so wonderful I guess um so that is pretty nifty um I will show you to while we're here and we're talking about shapes and putting text in it we didn't talk yet about the polygon frame tool and it's kind of fun because when you use it um these air how I made those trees in that little illustration but when you click and drag with it, you get polygons and the way that you the way that you tell it how many sides you want your polygon toe have is with your keyboard so if I'm clicking and dragging right now, it's set two three sides because that's what I used most recently apparently um and if I start pressing up or write it splits into that whole gratify business which is not what we want, so this is kind of funny but if you press space bar just once not present hold just press it toggles so that now your arrow keys will change your in dent or the number of sides that you have so you can make like births or stars or whatever so that's space bar so your space you click and drag and then use your arrow keys after your press space bar so we can have like a star shaped let's reduce the, uh oops space bar reduce the indent so it's a little easier for text and we'll do like this so now if we want to put text in here we can again click and then we'll fill it with placeholder again that's under type fill with placeholder text and now we have a little star of text which is kind of exciting, right? So that's like you're really basic just text frame putting text in it changing it, changing your fonts um your size your baseline shift, your color all that kind of stuff so let's talk let's go over here. This is a fun little layout that we're going to build you can see I already have some graphics here just to save us a little bit of time and we're going to focus on the text part because that's what we're here for um uh so here's what we're going to dio we are going teo and trying to decide what I want to do first um we'll make columns first how about that? So there's a couple ways you can do that you can use your type tool and click and drag and draw text box and then after the fact if you right, click within the text box and you choose text frame options this is where a minute ago we adjusted that infects spacing but in the same box we can also change the number of columns so I could say hey, three columns and when I click okay again, we don't see anything because we're in wonderful mode, so let me get out of this box and I'll press w and now we can see three columns now we still have one text box so it's not three individual text box boxes it's one text box that has three columns in it the neat thing is watch what happens if I put my cursor in this first box and then I choose a type fill with placeholder text it flowed from one column into the next column and over to the third column. Okay, now here's one of those things where I hope some light bulbs or turning on because you can't do this in photo shot right? You can't edit text like this across multiple columns across multiple pages because you can't even have pages in photo shop, so this is where it's really important if you're doing publishing where with text like this you really want to be using the right tool for the job. So look what happens when we go to edit this if I let's say we want to delete like this whole chunk of text right here when I press delete it actually wraps the text up because they're all connected so we call these linked text boxes we can or we could say that they are threaded together um and you know, if we make a change over here it's going to affect the way these go is well, so if I start hitting return a whole bunch you know, all of those text boxes are connected so it's going to push on through all of them another way to make text boxes is with the type tool again, but this time kind of like we did with our images where we used to the grid if I command now I can click and drag and if I use the right arrow I could just break it into three columns and I get that the differences these air actually individual columns now so I could like move them I could make someone crazy and like have crazy text boxes all over the place like this um because we used grid if I so let's try this again so we'll use tea for type and let's do a full paige with three columns like this okay and let's put some text in here so we'll go up to type and we'll choose fill with placeholder text so that's a whole bunch of text now let's talk about how we can link this over here and I'm going to go backto wonderful mood because I just don't want to see all these frames on my screen they're a little crazy okay? So I'm going to draw a new frame here so with the type tool I'm gonna click and drag just one single column under this little fruit headline that we have now what if I want this text box linked to these in other words I want my techs is to start in this box and just flow into these so these air already linked there already made but look what happens if I come over here and I click this import so at the top of our link our our text box we have like the anchor points for the corners and stuff but then we have this little box here this is called the in port so this is saying where the texas coming from so I'm gonna click that and I get this crazy looking cursor now my uh crecer is loaded with text so what I'm going to dio know man okay, we got to get back out of wonderful mode so we can see this so I'm going to click here and then come over here and I'm gonna click this box you see how it's linking there's um put a little link icon there when I click this box it tells in design hey, connect this box tto all of these so the text now instead of starting at the top of this column it actually starts over here and if I put my cursor in here and let's say I just hit a bunch of returns you see how it goes they're all threaded together into one giant story then we would call out a story so all those text boxes that are all part of one peace we call them a story so this is one story that is threaded across multiple text boxes if that makes sense okay, so that's looking pretty good but let's actually get rid of all that placeholder text and let's use real text what are we going to dio to get are really text in here? Well, we could copy and paste obviously we can go to a word doc and copy and paste or maybe a google dr wherever we're getting our material from our content but we can also actually just import we could just place a word doc directly in design so what we're going to dio willis was freaking out over here, okay, so what I'm going to do is just place that just like we would an image I'm going to go to file place and we'll go to the appropriate folder and I have some manuscript is here and I'm going to get all these choices were going to go ahead and click okay and now I have placed this word document in my text boxes in my story so that's really great I didn't have to copy and paste and here's what else is really cool if you look at this this is what happens a lot when you write in google docks I think I created this texture really in google docks it's a mash of like various random things that I've written on dh when you do that because you're working basically and in each two male environment you get a lot of double line breaks and like crazy things that make text editing and nightmare so we want to be able to clean clean that stuff up so while I'm in here in these text boxes I'm gonna come up to the edit menu and I'm going to choose find change right so I've got the text active we're goingto tell indesign to find certain things in all of this body of text and change it so edit find change and here it's saying what do we want to look for and what's nice is there some presets in here that are really handy so if I click this drop down okay I guess we have this button over here now, huh? That must be a new change that I didn't notice I don't know. Okay, well anyway that's over here we wanna have it look for um break characters now let's check the grip I don't know why it's not oh, here we are sorry I'm appearing query silly me okay wrong dropped down we'll come up here to query and what we want to look for is multiple rich turns so that's what happens a lot when you're bringing stuff over from each team l so query multiple return to a single returns I'm gonna click that so it's going to look for multiple line breaks that are in a row together and it's going teo replace it with a single one so what? We're going to go ahead and say change all and look at that it already searched and took care of seventy six instances of multiple line breaks so when we click done it looks better already write another thing that I want to clean up that's silly eh? So we'll go back to find and change, eh? So we'll come up back to query and this time instead of multiple returned a single return we're going to get rid of multiple spaces for all of you people that are still putting double spaces after your period the people do that still they dio right I was taught that in my junior high keyboarding class that you put double spaces after a period at the end of a sentence but you don't really need to do that anymore because especially in in design it's an intelligent software using intelligent fonts and so it knows howto deal with the spacing at the end of a sentence so we don't like we're not using and typewriter anymore ray we have amazing computers like khun intelligently decide that so that's kind of like a thing that came from the keyboard era type type rember what's that yeah, what does the typewriter? I actually learned my cuban and classes on a typewriter so I'm older than I and you might think well say but anyway so it on a typewriter situation you did put two spaces after a period but you don't need to do that anymore but for a lot of people in sort of a hard habit to break um so there is a way to deal with that you come in here and you choose multiple space to single space and then when you click change all oh it only found four instances of that so that's nice so we clicked done and now we have this nice um text situation that's looking pretty, pretty good let's while we're in here let's add a graphic into the middle of this right? So what we're going to do is grab our frame tool so f for frame tool and I'm gonna click to drag a box for a graphic so we'll let go oh and I've stolen my own thunder let me turn off my text rab okay we'll come back to that pretend you didn't see that okay so we have this frame there's the sound of the thunder rolling away as I let it out of the bag too early okay so we have this text from here or graphic frame and we're gonna drop an image into it so commander control d and I'm going to go back up here tio my links that I have and I have what are we doing this fruit psd okay so here's my fruit I don't need any options so we'll just click okay all right so everything is automatically wrapping that's great okay, so even if I move this to the back booger okay so this is what would really happen in normal life you would put in your graphic and the text would just flow right over it also I've moved this graphic behind the text so now I can't even click on it very easily the way to do that to click on an object that's behind another object you using the flexion tool you're gonna hold down command or control and then you can actually click behind so that's kind of a handy thing because how else would you get it so I've got this graphic now and it's sitting behind the text and as we can see, the text is running right over it. It doesn't look very good and it's hard to read, so what we mean to do instead is create a text wrap, so we need text to go around this image. So what we're going to do is open our techs rap panel and guess where it lives with all the other panels under the window menu. So window it's called text wrap. Um, we're going to click on that, and then I'm going to tuck it into my doc here because that's where it should be because it's handy and I need it often, so I've got it over there and we have these little buttons right here, and this one right here is no text trap, so currently by default. Normally this is what would happen. You draw a drop an image into a frame, you put some text around it, and this is what's going to happen. So what we need to do is instead we need to have the text wrap around the graphic sometimes, like, I think cork called this runaround text. Um, I'm making that up maybe, but in my days, I think I remember that court called it a text run around or something. But now it's called text wrap and we need the text to wrap around the graphic so I'm going to select the graphic on let's see what this does this is going to wrap the text around the abounding box so around the frame it's going to push the text to go around the bounding box that holds the graphic so that might be good and depends on our graphic if I just had a photo in there and it was a rectangle perfect but we don't have a rectangle we have more fruit on dh these images by the way coming to us courtesy of photo spin so that was really nice because they even let me give these to you in your, um, practice files. So that's pretty exciting, eh? So now we have this, uh, image here that has all this white space and we can actually take advantage of that. So the next button right here is called says wrap around the object shape so you think all right, well, that's easy, click that, huh? It looks the same as the bounding box. Well, that's because we haven't told in design how we want it to define the shape yet so with this selected here we can come down and tell it we'll leave that alone will come down here to contour options we can tell it to wrap around the bounding box which is redundant because that's what? This button does weaken tell it to detect edges let's see if we click on that. Oh, hey, let me zoom in so you can see a little better. So detecting edges let some of that text in here so as you can see, the box is way out like this and our text is now inside it and it's just up against this little edge around the fruit so that's looking pretty good so we could just use detect edges but this graphic I also put an alfa channel in it. So in photo shop, if we were to open this there is a let's take a peek. There is an alfa channel we open up our channels right down here there's an alfa channel so I've actually masked this in photo shop, but clearly we didn't even have to because in design detect edges worked justus well, but in case you really needed to be precise, I wanted to show you how that would work. So we can actually have the option in our text rap to tell it to go around the alfa channel. And if we had more than one elva channel, we could actually specify which alfa channel we were looking for right down here, so those are our great you could also tell it to use the same is clipping. So remember in the earlier session when we put the clipping detect edges around the fruit slices? If we had added a clipping path around this, we could just say, hey, just use the clipping path but the clipping path would probably say use the alpha channel or detect edges so its a little redundant there but that's kind of nice. So however we want to do this these air pretty much going to end up the same in this particular example, but that's pretty great. Another thing we can do is you'll see this little like blue outline is kind of a bubble around the graphic that is over here we can tell it how far we want to push that out from the edge, so if we want the text to come right up to the edge of this graphic, we can have it pushed out zero pixels and then the text is going to come literally up to the edge of the graphic but that's not very comfortable for reading, so I'm going to bump that back up to something that's a little more spacious on dh also okay, just so you know, we can tell it to include inside edges as well, so if for some reason we wanted text in this little ej here it really depends how big this kind of space is, but you can turn on, include inside edges and that'll let text kind of flow into some of these tighter corners, but you can also here's what I think is really cool if you want to really find tune this little path of text, wrap around your graphic if you grab your direct selection tool and you click in here, look at all these little points that you get, so maybe if I was like, well, I like it to wrap under here, but I don't know, I want to make sure nothing comes into this corner between the straws. You can actually click and drag these points and adjust well, zoom in on this really close, you can grab these points of the path and adjust them, so maybe I just close off this whole there's a lot of points, so it might be a little crazy, but I've I just I'm like, I don't want any chance that any text is going to come between these two straws. I'm going to just grab all these little points and drag him up like this, and basically I've built like a fortress around that corner around like nothing can get in yes, I've been doing that for years, is there a quicker way to instead of selecting and all those points will you try buffing you know going in here and buffing out the push this or don't turn on the inside edges but otherwise you know you don't have to do all these points let me undo this if we go back to like how it was I could just take one point and be like don't cross and just drag that over and that's going to do it too so you know it doesn't have to be so tedious so like over here if I'm like I just want a little more room right here if I pull this out it's going to push the text you see that so this is basically like an electromagnetic field around your graphics and you are saying hey no text is allowed in here you can really find tune it however you you want teo which is really, really pretty nifty um let's see if we oops I want to drag this down and see if we okay so like now we have some text in between the straw and if we say include the inside edge is still not pushing it out of there every graphic and every text and you know it's all a lot of these two these settings are going to really depend on the size of your font and you know so for me to tell you like here's the perfect text rap settings that you should use that doesn't work. It's. Just like if someone were telling you how to take a picture, they can't tell you what settings you should use, because every environment is different. Every situation is different. So it helps in that case, to really understand the bigger picture of just how this stuff works. So the exact settings that you're going to choose here are really going to depend on your graphic, the contours that it has the size of the text, that you're wrapping around it and all that kind of stuff.