Chapter 16: Flowing Text through a Document


Overview

It doesn't take much experience with InDesign to discover that all your text doesn't fit into the finite space provided by individual frames . Consider these scenarios:

  • If you're laying out a newsletter, you might receive an article in the form of a Microsoft Word document that you need to flow into several columns across a spread.

  • Or a magazine might have an article starting on page 20, then continuing on page 198, with the text originating from WordPerfect and saved as RTF for import into InDesign.

  • And with catalogs, you might have a continuous file exported from a database that contains different product descriptions, which are positioned below the items' pictures.

  • In book publishing, each chapter may be imported as a separate word processing file and flowed continuously through many pages.

  • Even the text of a simple advertisement, delivered by a client via e-mail, might flow through several text frames.

In all these cases, the benefits of frames ‚ the ability to size , resize, reshape, and place them with precision ‚ seem limiting. When the text doesn't fit in a frame, what are you supposed to do? Well, don't resort to cutting and pasting text into different frames. You need to keep the imported text together and link the frames that will contain the text. InDesign refers to the process of linking frames as threading and considers linked frames to be threaded. You can link frames on a single page, link frames from one page to another no matter how many pages are in between, and link frames automatically to quickly flow text while adding new pages with frames.

The text flowing through a series of threaded frames is considered a story. When you edit text in a story, the text reflows throughout the columns and threaded frames. You can also spell-check and do search and replace for an entire story even though you have just one text frame active on-screen. Similarly, you can select all or some of the text in the story and change its formatting, copy it, or delete it.

Cross-Reference ‚  

Chapter 10 explains how to create frames, while Chapter 14 explains what kind of text can be imported. Chapter 13 explains how to select, spell-check, and search-and-replace text. Chapters 17, 18, 20, and 21 explain how to format text.




Adobe InDesign CS Bible
Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible
ISBN: 0470119381
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 344
Authors: Galen Gruman

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