From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Setting text frame attributes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Setting text frame attributes

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- [Instructor] If you've ever framed a photograph, you know that it's all about managing where the image sits inside the frame, how far it is from the edge, and so on. Well, text is the same way, and you can control where InDesign positions text inside of a frame using the text frame options dialog box. Let me show you. In this frame over here on the left, you can see that the text is pressed right up against the edge of the frame, which is pretty ugly, so let's insert some space. To do that, I'll select it and then go up to the object menu and choose text frame options or you could press command B on Mac or control B on Windows. The inset spacing section in the middle of this dialog box lets us control how much space there should be. It's sort of like padding or margins between the edge of the frame and the text. If you want to have different amounts of spacing on each of the four sides of the frame, then click this button in the middle to unlink these fields. In this case, I'm going to change the left and right fields to nine points. And now when I turn on the preview checkbox, you can see that the text is pushed in on those sides. InDesign even shows you a faint line to indicate where the text inset is. Now, this looks good on the left and right, but I'd still like the top to be brought down a little so it looks more centered in the frame. I could just increase the top inset amount, but here's an easier way to do it. The vertical justification setting lets us say where the text should sit inside the frame. Right now it's aligned to the top of the frame, but if I change this to bottom, then you can see that the bottom of the text snaps to the bottom inset and all the extra space goes to the top. We can also change this to justify. That tells InDesign to distribute extra space between each line in the text to stretch it out. But in this case, I just want to use center. That looks pretty good, so I'll click okay. Now to show you one other text frame options feature, I'm going to jump to the previous spread by pressing option or alt page up. Let's select this frame over here on the right page. You can see that this frame has only one column, but I want the text to be split into three columns. Of course, I could just resize the frame and then make a couple more text frames and thread them together, but again, there's a much faster way. I'm going to go ahead and open the text frame options dialogue box. And now up here at the top, I'll change the number of columns. Let's set it to three. The gutter amount just below it is the amount of space between the columns. As you can see, this dialogue box actually has a ton of features jammed into it because text frames are such an important part of InDesign layouts. For example, I could come over here and choose column rules. Let's go ahead and turn that feature on. This inserts rules or lines between each column. Right now it's set to a one point rule, so let's make it thinner, maybe half a point. I'll click okay, and you can see that this frame now has three columns with a rule or line between each one. With all of these text frame options, InDesign really helps you strike the right balance between creativity, flexibility, and a tightly controlled design.

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