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Lesson Info

Create Multiple Pages in InDesign

Well, I may get text that flows over multiple pages. And what may happen is, I have this text box here, and I filled it with a lot of copy, and there's a lot of copy. I have no idea how much, because my little text overflow in the corner here is showing me that there's a lot of extra copy. I brought this in and I was like geeze, how many pages do I have? I don't know. You can create as many pages as you want, and you can also flow them over your pages, however you wanna do it. And this is what's called text linking. Because everything has to be in a container, it doesn't just automatically flow from one page to another to another. We have to tell it where it's going to flow. Easy. Gonna go under the Window menu and we're gonna call up my Pages panel, and right there is my Pages panel, and here is where I can dictate how many pages I want, put them in, move them around, add, take away pages, simple. With my Pages panel, I can click on the cheese grater, and I can say give me more pages.

And I'm gonna say okay, I want five more pages right there. Five more pages in my document. And I can just use my scroll wheel on my document, or on my pages panel, and I can just scroll up or down through all of these pages really quick. Super easy to get through with it. I call this the toilet paper scroll. It just scrolls and scrolls and scrolls for as long as you want it to. Yep. So. I've got my content. I'm gonna go into Preview mode, and I click on that and I see that little plus right there. I wanna be able to link this to another text container on another page, so I get constant text flow over the pages. Cause I don't wanna just do it container, and then chop it off and do another container, cause if I edit it and it goes longer or shorter, I want the text to literally flow. So I have my container here, and I click on my container, and I click on my overflow. I get my loaded cursor, which shows me that I can go to my next page here, and I just use my scroll wheel to scroll, that's as easy as it is. Or I can just double-click right there, and then I can take my loaded cursor, and I can draw another text container. And it flows the copy. But I wanna see where these are connected together. So I go under my View menu, under Extras, and I wanna show the text threads. Basically the little connector points right there. Okay? So it shows me how it connects, and I can do this throughout my entire document, and this is how we do large documents. We flow it into a container, and you take that, and we just connect these together, and connect these together, quite easily, and there it is. Flows all the way to the end. Do that. Flows to the end there. Don't even have to drag it, you just simply click it, and it just falls right in. And oh my gosh, I have no more copy, it's done. But this is how it works. So if I zoom out here, I see all my copy, and if I make any changes to any one of these containers here, I shore it up, and it just simply flows to the next button. So I can make it bigger or smaller, I can move it to another page, I can put an image in there and force the text around it, and it just simply reflows. That's how easy it is. If I need more pages, I just link two more pages. And linking is so incredibly simple. If I go and I have my copy on page one, I don't want copy on page two, I can select my copy on page two, and delete it. What happened to my link? Nothing. It just relinked to the other containers. Yeah. It's just link a link in a chain. It's pretty hard to mess up when you're going in and doing text linking. They make it super easy to do that. You know, I don't want this particular one in the link, not a problem, take it out, automatically links to it. I don't lose the copy, it just reflows to the next available link. That's it, yeah. That fast. Now, this is just copy that I created in here. What happens if I go in and I have a Word document, and I wanna put it in here? Very often, people will open up the Word document, go through, reformat it, copy it, piece it into InDesign. Don't bother, okay? Just gonna create a new document here. And I wanna place my Word document in here, by going under File and choosing Place. I'm gonna navigate to that Word document, wherever it may be. And there's my document here, but you know, I don't know how this Word document was done. Maybe somebody was graphic designer-ly and spent a lot of time trying to make it look good, it could have all the page breaks in there, it could be really highly formatted, I dunno what this looks like. So I don't wanna spend the time to wait for Word to launch, and copy it and paste it, don't wanna do that. But I do wanna clean this up before I bring it in. So when I go under the File menu and choose Place, which is how I place any graphic, any Word file, go under File, Place, but I'm gonna click on this Show Import Options right here. And so before I actually load this into my document here, I wanna do a little bit of cleanup on my Word document to make it nice and easy. So I click to Show Import Options, there's my Word document, I double-click, and it calls up and it says okay, what do you wanna fix on this? And it's like, one of the things is is that I wanna remove any formatting that was in here. So somebody went in and made it bold or italic or red or something, and that's what InDesign is for. I don't wanna pick it up from Word, I wanna take this as well. But I also wanna make sure that everything comes in, and one of the problems that can be really huge is you get page breaks. And all of a sudden it comes in, and it's like, where's your type, and you can't find it because there's a page break in there. It's like it imports this much of the copy, and it makes the text container big and you only get this much of the copy. So out of habit, I just go on and just strip it of all the extra style, so I get just the text. Plain and simple text, nothing extra. So I click OK, and I get my loaded cursor, and I can click and drag, and there's all my copy in there. Awesome. If I didn't go in, and I didn't clean up that formatting, I'm gonna go under File, Place, and I'm going to bring this in here, and I'm going to keep all the formatting and everything in there, and I'm gonna bring it in, I bring it in here, there it is, and it's like okay, there it is, and I open it up, and up, and up, and it's like, what's going on? Those page breaks that are in the Word document are now in my InDesign document, and you're like, what's going on, how do I get rid of it? And I go and I make the container bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and it's still, it's like what's going on? Well, one of the things that you have to get very used to with InDesign is understanding what's going on behind the scenes with InDesign. And under the Type menu, you wanna show your hidden characters. This is very important. Your hidden characters are gonna tell you a lot about what's going on in your file. And your hidden characters are every non-printing character, tab, space, return, indents, page breaks, and such. Those are gonna show up, and you can very quickly tell how somebody has formatted a file, then I can make it look good, but I can also find out that somebody went in and did this throughout the entire document, and you're just like, oh my gosh, yeah. Well your hidden characters are gonna tell you that, they're gonna show you everything that's going on in your document. Well, those hidden characters, as well, could be other stuff that's in here, and I don't know if these are page breaks, or what's going on, and so I'd have to go in and I'd have to keep deleting these and find out what these are, because if I put in a page break here, and I see these little symbols right here, these are page breaks. You'd never see them, because they're hidden characters. So going in and just making sure your Word document's really cleaned up, cause when people start to bring in a Word document, they start to stumble over this, it's best to go in and show the import options, bring it in nice and clean, nice and happy, or else you're really gonna be fighting all of this, all the time. So this is bringing it in formatted, this is bringing it in unformatted. All my copy's there, a whole lot more simple. It's as simple as going under File, Place, and when you bring your document in there, just click on your Show Import Options, and then set whatever style that you want here, and usually you say clean it up, just give me the text, I'll format it. And all good at that point. So once we put our content in here, I'm ready to go. I can adjust the size of my container here, if I want another container, I can just copy it, and I can take this out of here, and I can draw another container in there if I want to and put it some place else, but everything is gonna reside in a container, always. Sound good? Have any people that have any questions so far? Any in the studio audience? Alright, so a question that had come in earlier, and maybe there are any additional tips that you can give, this is for Leanne K. R. Gir, who said, "I have written a book in Word, and I'm going to copy and paste the text and pictures from Word into InDesign. Any big cautions? Do I create the text container first, or will it create when I paste the text into the page?" How about if you've got a big project like that? How would you approach it? So, I would go and I would actually research auto text flow, and that's going to go ahead and improve your life greatly. I would not copy from Word and paste it in, and I would not just go in and randomly paste it, but do auto text flow, and find out how awesome that is. I'd actually never open the Word file, I'd go in, and I'd actually take, I'd create a new InDesign file, I'd go in under File, Place, and I'd learn about auto flow, and I'd go in, and I would hold down this very special key, and my loaded cursor would then turn into this little snake-like thing, and if I click on it, it would actually format every single page the way I have my first page formatted, it will all the pages in my document that I need, it'll connect all my linked text containers and put it all together in one single click. And ya gotta know what it is that you press to get that. So auto text flow, ridiculously awesome. Okay, research that before you copy and paste another thing. Yep, so that's what I would do. Quick question on that from Laureen Davey, "When you remove styles and formatting, do you lose the typeface from the Word document?" You may lose the typeface in the Word document, but there's also a good chance that the typeface in the Word document doesn't match your fonts that you have using on your computer. So you may do that, but you may not. So, it's that possibility. Okay, question about, this is from Helena Vertaniks. "How do you change the height of the columns in the text container so they are not the same size?" So if you're in one text container, can you do that? So if you're in one text container, and you have two columns right here, your columns are always gonna be equal width, and always gonna be equal height. Now the text flow can be different on there, so it can flow in, but I can't go in and I can't make this physically make this section of the box shorter than this section of the box. If I wanted to go ahead and do that, what I would have to do is I would have to create a container, and then I have to then take my container and I would have to create another linked container, and I would have to place them at different locations if I want that kind of shift to happen. But I can't go in here and I can't say okay, make this shorter and make this longer. By default, it's going to fill from the top to the bottom, and then reflow over here. If you want this to balance out in the columns, so you don't have to keep fighting that balance, next to your little jail cell and supermarket doors is your balance column button, which allows you as you fill this in, it'll always keep those columns balanced at the bottom. So that's a nice feature as well. So I can leave my container larger while I'm working on it, and have it flow in.