Placing and flowing text - InDesign Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's look at placing text and how we can flow that text. Now, I have a text file prepared. It's "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. I'm not sure how many words it is, but it's a lot, and we want to flow this, and in such a scenario, a primary text frame is going to be our best option, but there are lots of other options as well, and we'll also look at those. So when you have text that has been prepared in a word processing app, like Microsoft Word or anything like that, then you want to place that text file and place. Keyboard shortcut command or control D, a good one to commit to memory, because it's one that you will be using frequently. So I'm going to create a document into which we can place the text. Command or control N, and I'll change my units to inches for now, and I want a document that is six inches by nine inches, portrait orientation. And in this particular case, I'm going to choose primary text frame. That means I'm going to get given a text frame, a container into which we can put the text, and then I'll come and change the margins to 0.75 of an inch. To have them be all the same, I'll click on the chain. That's make all settings the same. I'll go ahead and create this, one page starting on page one. Facing pages is also checked. So there is my first page. Command or control D, and we want to go to the 01_03 folder. Here's the text. It's a plain text file, as indicated by its extension, and then I will click open. Now let me just point out that we do have this box, show import options, and if I were to check this, then I would see a lot of options relating to the file format, in this case, a text file, and sometimes that's going to be useful. We don't want it in this case, but sometimes it can be useful, and if you just want to see the import options for this particular file but don't want this setting to remain sticky, then you can hold down the shift key. But I'm going to bypass that. What I have now is a loaded type cursor. Notice its appearance will change when I move over the type area where there is a primary text frame, because I checked that box. So I get parentheses around the preview of the type, rather than a dotted line. So that's just my visual cue that I'm going to be placing the text inside that primary text frame. It doesn't matter where I am here. It's going to go into that frame. What's more, because it is a primary text frame, if we now look on the pages panel, we see that it has created as many pages as are necessary to accommodate all of the text, which in this case is 50 pages. Now we have all these other text flow methods. Primary text frame is useful when you have a continuous flow that starts on page one and goes to the last page, but that may not always describe what it is you're doing. If you just want to add a bit of extra text, maybe I want to add something down here below the margin, then I can just switch to my type tool, and I did that by pressing the T key, and then I can just click and drag. When you click and drag, you make a text frame, and I can just type into that. But now I am going to create another new document, command or control N, the exact same specification as before, but this time without the primary text frame. So when I click right there, there isn't a container. We're going to need to make the frames ourselves. Command or control D, choose the text file, open. Now we see we have the loaded type cursor, but its appearance is not changing. It's not changing unless I move over that guide that indicates the top margin, and when I do that, you see that the black arrow becomes a white arrow. That's indicating that it is going to snap to that guide. So in this case, I need to be more precise if I want to start flowing my text from the top margin, which I do. Now when I click, I get a text frame that fills the type area, the area within the margins, but then it stops. It stops, and we have overset text, as indicated by the red plus. This is manual text flow. It's not really very appropriate in this case, because as we saw, we have 50 pages, so to continue this text flow manually would be quite tedious. But if I did want to do that, then here's how I would do it. I would create a new page. So on the pages panel, I'll just come and click on the plus symbol, and I should have thought to do this before I created the new page. I need to now go back to page one and then click on that red plus to reload my cursor, and now I can move to page two and I can flow another frame. Click on the red plus to reload the cursor, create a new page, et cetera, et cetera. Now of course, we wouldn't want to do that for 50 pages, so I'm going to back up a few steps by pressing command or control Z until I'm at this point where I have my loaded type cursor. So another text flow method that we have is autoflow. Autoflow is very similar to the primary text frame. In fact, in terms of InDesign's evolution, it predates the primary text frame. If I hold down my shift key, notice the appearance of my loaded type cursor changes. Hold down my shift key, and I also want to start flowing from the top margin, so I'm going to position over the top margin and now I can click and we get the same result as we did with the primary text frame. You may be wondering, well, why do we even need a primary text frame? Good question. It does have a few potential benefits over the autoflow method, but other than that, it is essentially the same thing. Let's just come back to our list. So we've seen the primary text frame. We've seen clicking and dragging to create a text frame and then typing into it. We've seen manual and we've seen autoflow. Two other variants, semi-automatic and autoflow without adding pages. So let's return to our work in progress, and once again, I'll press command or control Z to back up to this point, and I'm going to approach this slightly differently. Let's right click on the page one document page icon, choose insert pages, and I'll add 10 pages after page one. Let's come back to page one. Let's imagine that in this particular document, I only want the text to be on the right hand or recto pages, perhaps because I'm going to have pictures on the left hand page, or maybe it's a bilingual book and we want the other language to be on the left hand pages. So this might be a scenario where semi-automatic text flow would be useful. To get to this, we hold down the option or alt key. So I flow a single frame, the text flow stops, but then my cursor is automatically reloaded. I now move to the next spread, hold down the alt key and continue, and I can just keep on with that until I've flowed all of my text. So that's semi-automatic, holding down the optional alt key. I'll press command or control Z again until we get to this point where I have my 11 pages, and here is where the final variant can come in handy, autoflow without adding pages. Now autoflow, as we saw, will add as many pages as are necessary to accommodate your text. But let's say you have a fixed number of pages for your document. You might not want to add any extra pages, in which case, you can hold down shift and option or alt, and then what happens is the autoflow will fill as many pages as you have, but then stop. So now if we advance to page 11, we see that our text is overset, as indicated by the red plus in the out port.