Part III: Object Fundamentals

Chapter List

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

Chapter 11: Manipulating Lines and Frames

Chapter 12: Orchestrating Objects

Chapter 13: Timesaving Techniques

Part Overview

The basic objects in InDesign are frames and lines. With these building blocks, you construct almost all the components in a layout from the frame containers that hold text and pictures to original artwork you create in InDesign. The chapters in this part explain how the frame and line tools work, so you can create and manipulate layout objects.

First, Chapter 10 explains how to create frames and lines using the various shapes available in InDesign, from rectangles to curved lines. This chapter also explains how to convert a frame into one that can contain text or pictures, even if it wasn't designed to in the first place.

Once you've created frames and lines, you'll need to modify and embellish them. Chapter 11 explains how to reshape, resize, color , rotate, shear (skew), and do other manipulations to your frames and lines. This chapter gives you the knowledge you need to creatively apply and modify objects.

With your frames created to your liking, you'll find that you'll want to act on them even further, using InDesign's orchestration tools. For example, you may want to change the position of an object relative to another, to create a layered effect or have something appear on top of something else. You'll also want to group objects, so you can work on them all at once, such as moving a group all at once to ensure all objects in the group retain their positions relative to each other. Finally, you'll want to take advantage of InDesign's lock feature, which prevents you or someone else working on your document from inadvertently moving, adjusting, or deleting specific objects. Chapter 12 shows you how to do all this.

As you get more proficient in creating and modifying objects, you'll find yourself copying existing objects to reuse previous work. InDesign's step-and-repeat and other copy tools will help you do that, whether it's repeating an object within a page or reusing it in another document. Also, as you work with multiple objects, you'll find InDesign's alignment tools to be very handy to let you position both individual objects and groups of objects easily and accurately. Chapter 13 shows you how to copy and precisely position objects.