Lessons

Lesson Info

Add & Edit Type in InDesign

So first off, understanding text within InDesign. Everything that we do in InDesign goes inside a container. If we wanna put an image or a graphic or a logo we have to have a container. If we're gonna put type in InDesign, it's also gotta be in a container as well. So, with our type tool, we're gonna go in and we're gonna create a container here in InDesign that we can put our text in. Now one unique feature with InDesign is that since we've got all this stuff going on and this is probably fairly new to you with InDesign. InDesign has this unique feature that only InDesign has that when you are in a text container using the type tool or when you're in a graphic container or whatever mode you're in or whatever tool you're using, you can always right-click on whatever it is that you're doing and it's gonna call up a contextual menu that only relates to that tool and object combination. So if you're learning how to do this, it's a really great way instead of having to stop and hunt down t...

hrough the menus to find out what's going on. But a quick word of advice here. There's pretty much two things in InDesign. There's type, and there's objects. That's why they're the biggest menus, okay? If it isn't type, it's probably an object. If it isn't object, it's probably type. So you're gonna find it most likely in one of those two right there. I've taken my type tool, I've drawn a container on my page and I would like to fill this with some copy. And one of the things I can do, is I can go in and I can bring in a Word document very easily into this file so I can use and I can edit this content in here. So if I have a document readily available, I can just go under file, place and bring it right in. But one of the other features is, I may just be doing a quick layout and I want just some placeholder text to put this in to work with. I can have my text container, go under the type menu and I can fill with placeholder text. And it will take my container and it will fill it with text that I can work with and I can edit and just move around in case I don't have any copy. I do have a Word document, we're gonna get to that shortly. I'm gonna use my zoom tool here and I'm going to click and drag over that so I can zoom that in to full-size. You're constantly beginning zooming in and zooming out with your document here. And so people like to use the scroll bars and different methods here. Well the hand tool is great to move your entire document around and you can always go in and take your zoom tool and zoom in and then people panic once they zoom in. Oh my gosh, what do you do? If you double-click on your zoom tool, it's gonna fit everything actual size. If you double-click on your hand tool, it's gonna fit everything to the page. Pretty nice, huh? The other Adobe applications do that too. But with InDesign we're constantly zooming in and out because we're doing a lot of text flow and we're working over multiple pages. Unlike Illustrator and Photoshop we tend to stay pretty much in the same window, but InDesign we may have spreads, we may be scrolling through, moving around, we do a lot of movement inside InDesign. More so than that, so we zoom in, do some type editing, zoom out, do some placement, zoom in to get alignment. So going in and being able to zoom in and zoom out is great. You use your zoom tool and you can zoom into something. Double-click on your zoom tool on your toolbar, actual size. Double-click on the hand tool, fit to window. I brought my text into InDesign, I've drawn my text container, filled it with placeholder text, and now I'd like to go in and I'd like to edit my text. As I go in, one thing we do in InDesign all the time is editing text, constantly. We're constantly editing, adding text, changing the format, flowing it in, doing paragraph formatting, putting in images and I'm always gonna be editing text. Well to edit the text I need my type tool and to move my container around I'm gonna need my selection tool. So I'm constantly going back and forth inbetween the two. So if I look at my selection tool, I've got my selection tool here. With my selection tool, I actually have two different shortcuts. And the tool hints don't show up as quickly here in InDesign as they do in other ones. With my selection tool, there I have two shortcuts. The letter V, which is the same in the other Adobe applications, and also the Escape key and you'll see why. And then the type tool here is just simply T for type. The reason why I mention that is because when I've drawn my container and I've put type in there, in order to move it around I'm gonna need my selection tool. So I can move it around and I can also resize the container by pulling on the handles. But when I'm done I need to get in and edit my type which requires the use of the type tool. I can always go back and use the type tool or with my selection tool, I can double-click. And that's gonna automatically turn this into the type tool so I can select my type. When I'm done and I wanna move my container around again, I need to go back with my selection tool. And I know that the keyboard shortcut for the selection tool is V. And so what happens when I type the letter V when I'm editing text? I get the letter V. And some people are like, well that's stupid. And it's like okay, if you need the letter V it's nice to be able to type that. So the shortcut to get out of your type editing mode is the Escape key. And it turns it back into your selection tool. Selection tool I can move it around, double-click I get my type tool and my cursor starts flashing in there. Escape gets me back out. Shortcuts that are absolutely necessary. Sure you can always go over and use your selection tool or use your type tool. I have my container selected. Double-click, I get my type tool. To change the type, I need to have it selected. Double-click does a word, triple-click does a line. Four clicks does an entire paragraph. Five clicks does absolutely everything in your text container. When I say everything in your text container keep that in the back of your mind there, because if I don't select everything in my text container and I change the font, even text that I don't see, if I don't have it selected, I can't change it. So double-click does a word, three clicks a line, four a paragraph and five, everything. Whether I can see it or not. With my type selected, I can now go in and I can change my font. I'm not gonna go under my type menu, 'cause it's not as easy to use. But I've got this control bar that runs across the top here, and InDesign packs everything into the control bar. So many items. And when I have my type selected, I have my character formatting controls and then I have my paragraph formatting controls. If you have a very large computer screen, you will be able to see all of your character and formatting controls across the top. If you have a shorter or smaller monitor or shorter workspace here, you're going to have to switch back and forth between the two in order to call up your character formatting and your paragraph formatting. It's all there, it just switches it back and forth from one end of the control bar to the other. With the type selected, I have my font menu that I can choose from. Easy way, just select any of these. But the easier way is to put my cursor in the type window with my type selected and my cursor in the type selection window, I can use my up arrow or down arrow to go in and select any font that I want. Pretty easy. And then from that font I can go and I can choose any other type of style with that. I can do regular, bold, whatever it may be from my drop-down menu of the style underneath. One thing InDesign does not have, is it does not have fake bold and fake italic. There is no button that I can go over here and just say make it bold and make it italic, doesn't work. If you choose a font that does not have bold or italic in it right there, and you wanna make that bold, you don't get bold. Just doesn't happen. Reason why is that a lot of the stuff wasn't printing or reproducing correctly. If you want bold and that font doesn't have it, you'll need to pick another font. Pretty simple. With InDesign it's all about text. It's all about text manipulation so we can do everything that we want. We have our ability to go in and change the font here and then we also have our letting as well. All caps, super script, underline, lowercase caps and so on. Our kerning and our tracking so that we can go ahead and tighten up or loosen up our letters. Vertical, horizontal scaling and such. Somebody's like, "Oh you've got fake italic here." No, I call that drunken tilty type. 'cause all it does is just take it and lay it over. Like wheat in a windstorm, forget it. Just don't use it. You want bad italic, that's what Comic Sans is for. Okay, there you go. Also, we can set the color of our type as well. And we go to our type color and we have the ability to go in and choose from different colors here, and our limited color palette, at this time we're gonna add colors. But we go in, there's our type. Pretty easy. With our paragraph formatting controls, we're gonna switch over to our paragraph formatting controls and this is where we can go and set our left-centered, right justified text, as well as what I call the apartment building, which if you hover over each one of these it'll show you left indent, right indent, first line indent, space before the paragraph, space after, drop caps; we have our bullets. We have our numbering, we can turn off our hyphenation as well so we don't have hyphenated words. All of this can be done right here in the control bar. Ready access to it. You're gonna use this all the time because this is what InDesign is for. It's for formatting copy, putting it in. Because everything that we do is going to be inside a container, we have to make sure that the containers are big enough for what we're doing. So already I had drawn my container and I realized that my container is not showing me all my copy and I know that because I have this red plus down in the lower right-hand corner. And that tells me that my container isn't big enough. Partly because I went in and selected my copy and made it larger. So whatever I don't see, I can't select. If I go in here and I take my type tool and I click and drag and go all the way to the bottom I can't select everything I can't see. Which is why that five clicks works really good 'cause that selects everything, whether you see it or not. Very important to understand that. Go back to my selection tool, and I need to increase the size of my text container in order to see all my copy. And some people go in and they just open this up all the way and have a whole bunch of extra space down at the bottom of their containers. Well you don't wanna have that, because extra container space is like a shoelace. At some point, you're gonna trip on it. People are like oh no, I've never had that problem. Well, guess what? You have something, and you've got a picture of something and it's behind there, and you go to click on that and you're like oh, I want that picture. Now I want that picture, and you keep clicking on it but that text container is in front of it. Even though there's no text in it, it's selecting the text container. So just like that shoelace, you're gonna trip on it. So when you put text in the container, best practice is is always make sure you tidy up your containers. Put the lid on it, okay? So what I wanna do is I wanna go in here and I want to clean up my text containers. If my text container is too small and I can't fit all of my content, I can take my selection tool and I can keep opening it up and hoping that the next time is the last time and it's like oh, that's too far and then I have to go and clean it up here. Don't bother. Simple and easy way to snap your containers to the size of your copy. Take your selection tool, select your container. Double-click on the center bottom pull handle. Opens it up 'til you get to the end of your copy. So if it's closed up, double-click on the center pull handle, there it is. Opens it up. If your container is much larger, some people like to draw really big containers just to make sure. I wanna snap it to there as well. Select the container with the selection tool. Double-click on the center pull handle there. Snaps it right up there. Works great every time. Awesome. Cleans up your text containers, works beautifully. Now, I have a two-column grid on my page. And I would like to go and put my text over these two columns. Well because this is a container, I can do whatever I want to with this container. One of the things I can do is I can actually take that container, I could make it go over my entire width of the page, but then I can also take this container and say okay, make this container into two columns so that I have a two-column container. I don't have to create two separate containers. I can take this and basically split it up. You can do this in a couple ways. The control bar is always gonna be there for me to do everything that I wanna do. If I click on my text container here, I go up into my control bar and I have a little jail cell and the supermarket doors. Right there. The reason why I say that is because it's like we have so many buttons up there that it gets really tricky. I can go in and I can select my container and I can control the number of columns I have in that container, like that. I can also go into the object menu. You're probably saying, isn't this a text container? Well, there's two aspects to everything in InDesign. We have our text, which is inside a container. Then we actually have our container which is our object. Same with images or graphics we have the container that it resides in, which is an object then we actually have our content. So in this case, I want to set the attributes for my object or my text container, but it's still a container. And I can do that under my text frame options. And under my text frame options is where I can set a lot of different items, or options, for each container. So if I go under my text frame options you can see here that's the number of columns that I have. I can click on my preview. One column, two columns; I can also change the gutter, which is the space in between them. So that I can get my copy in there. Now this is two columns, so if I short this up here it just simply flows from one to the next to the next. Great. Don't really have to worry about much information at all. I can put more copy in here, and I can also open this up at any point and it just simply flows from one column to the next. Great. Works wonderfully. Doesn't matter how many columns I have. I can have a three or a four column right there, sure. Shorten that up, flows from one to the other, to the other, to the other. Moves it all around with it, awesome. Self-contained, works great. Love it. So with those text containers, since all the text I'm gonna do is gonna go inside a container. Can do other things with this as well. Because this is a container, I can also put a fill inside the container if I want a color. I can put a stroke around the container as well. So I can have some type of border around there. But it's still just a text container. So I'm gonna draw a text container and I wanna put some type in there. Gonna select it. Shift command, greater than or less than increases or decreases your font size. There it is, I want to center my text within my container, so I use my center justify right there. I'm gonna go back to my selection tool. Now I'd like to put a border around this, 'cause it's a container. So I can put a fill in this container, can put a stroke around this container. And it can also hold texts; it can do a lot of things. So I'm gonna put a border around this container. You may look at this and say, you know there is a border around this container. Well there isn't. This is what we call our frame edges, so we can tell what's actually there on the page. Now every time we draw a container we're always gonna see this frame edge. This doesn't print, so we just know that it's there so we know where to select. And one of the things we can do is we can hit the letter W. And W will allow us to get into preview mode here and we can actually see what this layout looks like before we go to print. 'cause the more content we put in there, we're gonna see these frame edges around every single container that we have and it could get very busy. So W shuts off my grids, my guides, and shuts off all of my frame edges so we can see exactly how it looks. And that's the preview mode right there. You can also access that preview mode by going up into my application bar. Here's my preview modes; normal or preview. W is what cycles through those right there. So if you don't like seeing those it's fine, you can work with this off, doesn't make any difference. But every time you select something you're gonna see that frame edge. Doesn't change anything, it just is a preview mode as you work. I wanna put a border around this container. So I'm gonna select my container. And I have my fill. And I have my stroke swatches here. Gonna put a black stroke around here. And then I'm gonna go up and I'm gonna set the weight of that stroke around my object. Now I can center my text left to right by taking my type tool, selecting the text, and then saying okay, left-centered or right justified. But now I'd like to put it in the middle of the box. People are like, oh yeah. So what I would normally is I would put no container here, and then I'd take my box and I would draw a completely different box here. And then I'd put a border around that box right there so that way I can put this in the middle of my box there, and get it right in the center. Awesome. Right in the center. Right in the center. Okay, close enough. And then of course what happens when you move the box, the type doesn't go with it. And it's like well, yeah, you know-- The whole point of having a box is do everything you can with that box. So I've got my text centered left to right. I've got my border around the whole thing. If I go back under my text frame options under my object menu, I can set my text so that it doesn't start at the top of my box. I can set it so that it starts in the center of my box. No matter what size my box is. By default, it starts at the top and goes down. Well that makes sense when we're creating a text container. When I do that, here's the beauty of it. I make the box bigger, oh my gosh. It literally stays with it, because it's all part of the box. I know. You move it, and it moves with it. Imagine that. Pretty cool. Love it. Now what happens if we have a normal text container? Well this is great if I wanna do some type of headline display, this works great and now I don't have to fight with two boxes and make sure they line up. It's all there, it's all right there; I wanna make it go across my page, there it is. It goes across the page. I'm done. If I have a normal text container here, and I put a border around that container and I go under preview mode, now I look at that and all my type is running right up against the edge of that border. It's not normally an issue, because I don't put a border around a lot of my stuff. But when I do this it's like, oh yeah, that's what we have. So people are like, oh I'll fix that. (hits space bar) and it's like ... No, okay? This is not Microsoft Word. At all. The space bar and the tab key are not meant to get you quickly moved down the road here. So if I take my context container and I go back under my object menu under my text frame options, I can do my little inset spacing, which is this little forcefield around the inside of my box that just forces the text away from the edge which gives me a perfect buffer zone. Why is that so handy? Because when/if I do this on any other page there, I know the exact measurement I can put in there. There is no guesswork. You use two boxes, one that has the border, one that has text, and it's never quite the same on every single page. InDesign is all about streamlining, making it clear, make it simple, and keeping it consistent. Absolutely important. So there's a lot that I can do with text and text containers right off the bat in InDesign, because that's what it's for. Text flow, text formatting, you name it.