Chapter 10: Adding Text Frames, Picture Frames, and Lines

Overview

When you create a new InDesign document, you make several important decisions ‚ including the page size , number of columns , and gutter width ‚ that determine the basic structure of your publication. After you click OK in the New Document dialog box (File ‚ New, or z +N or Ctrl+N), you're greeted with a blank first page. Much like an artist confronting an empty canvas, it's now time for you to add the text, pictures, and graphic elements ( shapes and lines) that will make up the final piece.

InDesign uses objects as the building blocks you manipulate to create finished pages. An object is a container that can (but doesn't have to) hold text or graphics, as well as attributes such as color , strokes, and gradients; when an object contains an imported graphic or text; if an object was created as a placeholder for a graphic or text, it's referred to as a frame. A frame looks and behaves much the same as an object but has some additional properties:

• If you change the size or shape of a frame that contains text, you affect the flow of text in the frame and in any subsequent frames of a multiframe story.

• If you change the size or shape of a frame that contains an imported graphic, you also change the portion of the graphic that's visible.

Designing pages in InDesign is largely a matter of creating and modifying frames and modifying the text and graphics the frames contain. If, for example, you're creating a simple, one-page publication such as a business card, an advertisement, or a poster, you'll likely add several text frames to the page; each text frame will hold a different piece of textual information. In the case of a business card, text frames would contain the company name, the name and title of the cardholder, the company address and phone numbers , and so on. If you want to include pictures or computer-generated illustrations in your piece ‚ maybe you want to add an EPS version of a corporate logo to your business card or a scanned image to an ad ‚ you must also add graphics frames. A graphics frame serves as the cropping shape for the image within.

In this chapter, I show you how to create and modify basic text frames, graphics frames, and straight lines. After you create a text frame, you can enter text directly into it or you can place a text file from a word processing program. (For information about importing, formatting, and flowing text through a document, see Part IV.) After you create a graphics frame, you can import a graphic into it and then crop, scale, or apply other effects to the graphic. (For more information about importing and modifying graphics, see Part V.)

New Feature ‚  

InDesign adds the Control palette in version CS, taken from PageMaker (which took it from QuarkXPress). It provides the basic controls for objects all in one place. Chapter 11 covers this versatile palette in more depth, though you can get a glimpse of it in several figures in this chapter.

Cross-Reference ‚  

This chapter focuses on creating simple frames and straight lines. You can also create complex shapes and convert them to frames for holding text and pictures. For more information about using InDesign's Pen tool to create freeform shapes and curved lines, see Part V.