Summary

When it comes to drawing with the Pen or Pencil tool, close is plenty good enough. That's because InDesign lets you modify paths in many ways by moving, adding, and deleting anchor points; by switching smooth points to corner points and vice versa; and by dragging direction lines. You also have the option to extend either or both ends of an open path and to close open paths.

If a path requires more drastic surgery, you can use the Scissors tool, which lets you split any kind of path into two pieces.

Because InDesign is primarily a page-layout program, it doesn't contain the breadth of illustration-specific features that you would find in a dedicated vector-based drawing program. Although you may decide that you need a dedicated illustration program to handle your industrial-strength drawing tasks , InDesign does have several features for creating complex shapes .

For example, the Compound Path command lets you combine several paths into a single object. If you want to add a graphic flourish to the corners of a path, the Corner Effects command lets you apply any of several built-in corner styles and specify the size of the corner effect.