From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using anchored objects - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Using anchored objects

“

- [Instructor] This photo here has been placed on my page and given a text wrap, so the text flows right past it. And the layout looks pretty good right now. I'm going to zoom in by pressing Cmd or Ctrl + plus sign a few times. So good. Now, what if we need to edit the text? The graphic of the text are supposed to stay together. But if I use my type tool and, let's say, I'll just grab some of this text and delete it, well, now we've got problems, because the text moved but the graphic didn't. So how can we tell the picture to move along with a text? To do that, we need to make it an inline or anchored object. Let's first undo that to get our text back. We're going to turn this object, this graphic, into an inline object. So first I'm going to use the selection tool, select it, and cut it to the clipboard with a Cmd or Ctrl + X. Now I'd like to give it its own line to sit on. To do that, I'm going to double click to switch back to the type tool and then press return or Enter to make a blank line. I want this graphic to sit on that line as though it were part of the story. To do that, I simply place the cursor on that line and paste, Cmd or Ctrl + V. When you cut or copy with a selection tool and then paste with a type tool, the object becomes an inline object. It's sitting right there on that paragraph. Now, it doesn't look quite right, of course, and that's because this paragraph has absolute letting. That is look up here in the control panel. See how the letting is odd number? So let's change that. Here in the pop-up menu, choose Auto. I almost always use an actual value for letting, but this auto letting feature is super helpful for inline objects because it says, take however much space you need. I'm also going to switch over here to the Paragraph Formatting mode and then center that horizontally. Now, that looks much better. The object is in-line, so if I make that same kind of edit, like coming in here and deleting text, it moves. Or if I just start typing some gibberish, you'll see it moves down the page. Okay, let's look at another example. I have a couple of icons here on the right margin and I'd like to make them flow with the text too. I could use that cut and paste method that I just showed you, but here's an even easier method. First, I'll choose the selection tool and click on one of these frames. And see that little blue box in the upper right corner? That's the anchor box. And when you drag that anchor box into the text, something happens. You see a little dark line wherever you drag it to, and that line means this is where it's going to be anchored. But before you let go of the mouse button, you need to make a decision about if you want the object to be in-line so that it moves into the frame at that position, or if you want it to be anchored to that place, but stay where it is. Let's make it anchored. I'll drag it to here and then let go of the mouse button. See how it doesn't seem like anything changed, but it did. It's anchored to the text where I dropped it. In fact, you can see that little blue box turned into an anchor icon. Now, I could put this anywhere I want on my page, like I'll just drag it up to here. You'll notice this blue dash line from the place that it's anchored to. That's really helpful to see. If you don't see that, you can go to the View menu, come down to Extras, and then choose Show Text Threads. Now, once again, this is actually anchored, so if I switch back to the type tool and type some text in here, you can see it moves up or down the page, but it won't move left or right. Okay, now let's do the same thing to this frame down here. I'll drag the anchor box out, but this time I'm going to hold on the Shift key before I let go of the mouse button. The Shift key tilts InDesign to make it an inline object that is it's treated just like it's text in the story, like that photo of the flowers, but in this case, it's on the same line as the text. The icon is too high up, so no problem, you can drag it down a little bit. And let's open the Text Wrap panel from the Window menu and turn on wraparound the bounding box. That looks much better. It's like a little icon before the paragraph and it will flow with the text. Now, one last thing I need to point out about these anchored objects and that's how to get them unanchored again. To do that, you can select the anchored object with a selection tool, cut it to the clipboard with a Cmd + X or Ctrl + X, and then paste it with Cmd or Ctrl + V. There it is. I'll move it back to the margin. That frame is no longer anchored in the text. There's a lot more that you can do with anchored and inline objects in your documents, but I think you can see that setting up these kinds of relationships between texts and objects can really speed up your production work.

Contents