From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adding text frames - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Adding text frames

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- [Instructor] There are probably a few people who use InDesign for pictures only, but most of us need to put text on our pages. Well, you cannot have text without a text frame. And the simplest way to make a text frame is to use the Type tool. Now to show this to you, I'm going to scroll over to the left a little bit using my grabber hand. That's Option + Space Bar on the Mac or Alt + Space Bar on Windows. Then I just click and drag. Next, I'll go to the View menu, and I'm going to turn off Match Pasteboard to Theme Color. That way my pasteboard goes blank. That's a little easier for me to see what I'm doing. Okay, now I'm going to choose the Type tool from the Tool panel, and then I'm simply going to click and drag with that tool. You'll notice that as I'm dragging, I get the measurements of that frame in a little field to the right of the cursor. That helps me create just the size I want. Then when I let go of the mouse button, the text cursor is flashing inside the frame, ready for me to start typing. By the way, some people call these text boxes, but the proper word is frame. Now, there are several other tools for making frames as well. Down the Tool panel, just a little bit, you'll see these frames. I'll click and hold for a moment, and I get this little popup menu. Here, I see the Rectangle Frame tool, the Ellipse Frame tool, and the Polygon Frame tool. Now, technically, these are from making graphic frames. For example, I'll choose the Rectangle Frame tool and click and drag out a frame. That big X in the middle of the frame tells me it's supposed to have a graphic inside of it. But you know what? InDesign doesn't care. You can easily change one kind of frame into another simply by grabbing the Type tool and clicking on top of it. But before I do that, just notice the cursor for a moment. Out here where there's no frame at all, I get a kind of cursor that says, "Well, I could make you a frame if you want." But as soon as I move the cursor on top of this frame that's empty, I get a different cursor. Kind of a dotted circle. And that dotted line indicates that when I click, it's going to turn this frame, this empty graphic frame into a text frame. So it's always a good idea to watch that little cursor because it's going to tell you what's going to happen next. When I click, it changes into a text frame, and once again, I can just start typing. Now, there's another set of tools just below that one that are technically for drawing shapes. Once again, a Rectangle, Ellipse, and Polygon. These are for drawing shapes. They're not really supposed to have text or graphics in them. But just like with graphic frames, InDesign doesn't care. I'll choose the Ellipse tool, and then I'll come out here and hold on the Shift key while I drag, that forces it into a circle. Then I can turn that into a text frame by choosing the Type tool and simply clicking on it. Now I'm typing inside of the circle. Okay, there's one more way that you can make a text frame and InDesign, and that is to import a text story, like a Word file or an RTF file. By the way, that's what InDesign calls a bunch of text. It's a story. Like over here in the middle, there's one story. Over on the right, there's another story. But before we import the new story, I want to make sure I don't have a frame selected on the page or a text cursor flashing in a frame like this. If I do, then when I place the story, it might go in here, and that's not what I want. So I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Deselect All. Now I'm safe. Okay, I want to import my new story onto the previous spread. So I'll go to the Layout menu and choose Previous Spread. Now, let's go get the story by going to the File menu and choosing Place. I'm going to go into much more detail about placing files in a later chapter. But for right now, all I'm going to do is select this file from Microsoft Word inside the folder from the Exercise Files. Then I'll click Open. When I do that, you'll see that InDesign loads up the place cursor. It even shows me a little tiny thumbnail of the text. Now, at this point, I have several options. I could just click, and InDesign makes a frame for me and loads the story into it. Or let me undo that. I'll press Command + Z, or Control + Z on Windows, and that reloads the place cursor. And this time, I'm going to click and drag out a frame. When I do that, I can control exactly how large the text frame should be. As soon as I let go of the mouse button, InDesign places the story into the frame. Finally, if you already have a text frame, like this empty one over here on the left side of the spread, I can put the story into it. So once more, I'll undo, and now I'm going to place my cursor on top of that empty frame. Again, if I place it over here, I get one kind of cursor, move it on top of the empty frame, and it's slightly different, kind of a parentheses. That means the story is going to go into that frame. Click, and there we go. Now that you know how to get a text frame and put some text into it, let's take the next step, editing and then formatting the text inside that frame.

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