Adobe InDesign: Using Text

Name: Adobe InDesign: Using Text
Author: Patti Scully-Lane

Gone are the days when you needed a dedicated team of professional typesetters and pressmen to prepare a poster, brochure, magazine, or newspaper for print. We…

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Course: On-Demand

In this lesson, you are going to learn how to create a text frame and also how to add content to that text frame. In InDesign, I'm going to go to the file menu to open and I'm gonna navigate out to where I have the lesson files from chapter two and I'm gonna select the adding_text.indd document. And I'm gonna open that up. Once my document is open, over on the right, I'm going to click on the pages panel and make sure that I have page one selected. Now I have the pages panel and the properties panel here. If you don't have those panels open, you can go to the window menu to workspace and switch back to the essentials workspace. If you still have problems seeing what I have, then go down to reset essentials and that will reset the essentials workspace so that you have the panels that we need for today's lesson. In order to create a text frame, we have to go over to the tool bar over on the left and select the type tool. When we select the type tool, we get an I-beam and we can click hold and drag to create a text frame. Now I'm gonna type in there January. It's quite small now and you can see that it's a little bit grayed out but now you can see a preview. Sometimes when you see what looks like a gray line, that's what we call Greeking. And it just means that the type is so small that InDesign is having a tough time previewing it. In order to reveal that text, you can zoom in on your document but I'm going to leave mine as it is because a preview did come up. Now, I'm gonna select my text by clicking and dragging in that text frame. In the properties panel, I'm going to go to the character area to change the size of our font. So where it says 12 points, we're gonna click on the dropdown menu, just to the right of that. We're gonna choose 48 points. Depending upon how large you made your text frame, you may see all of your texts or you may not. In order to change the size of your texts frame, we need to use our selection tool. So I'm gonna go to the toolbar over on the left and at the top, there's a black arrow and that is my selection tool. The selection tool allow use us to resize our frames as well as move those frames around our page. So I'm going to click on the bottom right corner and if your frame is too small and you have a little red plus sign in the bottom right corner then you can click and drag out that frame and that will allow you to see your text. My frame is a little bit too big, so I'm gonna click and drag it in a little bit. Now I also want to move my text frame. So I'm going to click on the text and just move this over a little bit so that it's more centered on the page. In order to move or resize a text frame, you need to use your selection tool. Another way besides typing that you can get our text into InDesign is by copying and pasting. So I'm gonna go over to the type tool again, over in the tool bar and I'm gonna click hold and drag to create another text frame. I can see that I have a flashing cursor in the top left of that text frame. I'm going to bring in some texts from another program. So I have Notepad open. If you're working on a Windows machine, you can open up Notepad. If you're working on a Mac, you can open up TextEdit. Now from that program, I'm gonna go to the file menu to open and from the lesson files, we have a folder of text files. So I'm gonna double-click on that text files folder and open up the January_podcast.txt and open that. I'm going to select all of my texts by clicking and dragging and go to the edit menu to copy. I'm gonna go back to InDesign, put my cursor back in that text frame and go to edit and paste. Now again, my text is a little bit small and for a second there it was Greeked out but then InDesign was able to preview it. I'm gonna select it all by clicking and dragging. And I'm gonna go over to the properties panel and I'm gonna change the size of this to 30 points. So in this lesson, you learned how to create text frames and how to add content to those text frames by either typing or by copying and pasting.

Beginner Provider : Patti Scully-Lane 7 Lessons · 38m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

Gone are the days when you needed a dedicated team of professional typesetters and pressmen to prepare a poster, brochure, magazine, or newspaper for print. We have dedicated apps for all that now, but none quite so prominent as Adobe InDesign, which has come to dominate the desktop publishing industry, making it an essential tool for modern-day communication. In this Beginner Adobe InDesign course, you will learn the basics of working with InDesign and how it fits in with the Creative Cloud desktop app. From there, you will learn how to open existing documents and create new documents from scratch using Adobe’s templates. Then you will progress to adding text and graphics to the page, as well as exploring and applying basic character and paragraph formatting, including a primer on working with Adobe fonts. You will understand how to analyze graphics to determine if they are vector or raster, RGB or CMYK, and if they have the correct resolution for your output. Finally, you will both link and embed graphics to figure out which is best for your situation; then you will see how to crop and modify those graphics to better fit your available page space.

In these lessons, you will learn how to work with text, the heart of a document. You will create text frames to place your text in, as well as learn different options for their text frames. Finally, you will learn a few of the many ways text can be affected, like placing text on a path, or even including placeholder text.

What You'll Learn

Create text frames to place your text within an InDesign document
Place text into your document and apply text placement techniques
Configure text frame options to control how your text appears
Thread text frames to flow text across multiple frames
Use the Story Editor to work with your document text
Place text on a path and add placeholder text and special characters

Key Takeaways

Adobe InDesign dominates the desktop publishing industry and is an essential tool for modern-day communication.
Text is the heart of a document, and text frames are used to place text within InDesign.
Text can be affected in many ways, including placing text on a path and including placeholder text.
The course covers creating text frames, adjusting text frame options, and applying placement techniques.
InDesign lets you open existing documents and create new documents from scratch using Adobe's templates.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to work with text in InDesign, including creating text frames to place your text in, exploring different options for text frames, and ways text can be affected such as placing text on a path or including placeholder text.

What level is this course?

This is a Beginner Adobe InDesign course that teaches the basics of working with InDesign and how it fits in with the Creative Cloud desktop app.

Which lessons are included?

The lessons are Creating Text Frames, Placing your Text, Text Frame Options, Threading Text Frames, Using the Story Editor, Placing Text on the Path, and Placeholder Text and Special Characters.

What skills will I gain?

You will gain skills in Adobe InDesign, Structured Text, Text Editor, and Text Manipulation, working toward Adobe InDesign Certification.

What is InDesign used for?

Adobe InDesign is used to prepare items such as posters, brochures, magazines, or newspapers for print, and it has come to dominate the desktop publishing industry.