From the course: Designing a Book

Generating captions - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Designing a Book

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Generating captions

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- [Instructor] Let's just take stock of where we are. In the previous movie we placed the images roughly in position according to these image markers, which of course, we will be deleting. Now each of these images has a caption and we are going to auto-generate that caption. You will remember that the original images began with caption as part of the image. I have cropped this out and rekeyed the caption in the File Info. So it's now part of the image metadata. And we can take advantage of that in InDesign. So the first thing we need to do is address our caption set up. And we currently have 236 pages and our 23 images are dispersed across our 236 pages. I'll come to the Object menu and down to Captions, Caption Setup. The type of metadata that I am using in this case is Description, down at the bottom there. I want the caption to go below the image with an offset of zero. I want the caption grouped with the image. And that's important and that's why we're doing this step before we anchor the image, because we need to anchor the image and the caption as a group. We want a specific paragraph style applied to the caption text. That style isn't yet made, so I'll come down to New Paragraph Style. Let's give it a name. For now I'm just going to base it on the body text. Once we generated the caption, we can come back and change its appearance. I'll click okay and then click okay. Next I'll open the links panel. If you see your link info, you can close that, we don't need that for now. This is a list of all of the images in the document. I'll select the first, hold the shift key and select the last. From the Links panel menu choose Captions. And I'm going to generate a static caption. I'm going to generate static as opposed to live captions, because live captions, like text variables, do not break the line. So if the caption is long, that would be a problem. And when I do so, we see that we have caption right here on page 11. And I can just use Links panel to jump to my next image and there's caption right there and right there. So all of our captions are now generated. And further more the image is grouped with the caption. I'll now come to the Paragraph Styles and change the definition of the caption text. Right click on Caption. In Basic Character Formats I'm going to make it italic. I'll make the alignment center. I'll chose to balance the ragged lines so that we lines of roughly equal length. And set the first line indent to zero, so that that doesn't through off the centering. One more thing, in Hyphenation, we do not want the captions to hyphenate, so I'll turn that off. There's one other issue and if I move the caption slightly, let's see if I can recreate the problem. In certain positions, because we are using a baseline grid, if the caption text is not sitting on that grid, we are going to get overset text, as indicated here by the red plus symbol. As a way to avoid that, I can create a caption object style. So I'll just deselect my current selection, come to my object styles and make a caption object style. All I'm concerned with here is the text frame autosize options. I'll set the autosizing to height only, to size from the top. Click okay. Now as I said, we have 23 of these captions throughout the document, how do we apply the caption to them all? Well once again, we can use Find Change. I'll come to my Find Change and I'll just quickly clear out any previous settings. Click on the Objects tab. What we're looking for is any objects that has the style none applied. And what we are changing that to is the object style of caption. I'm looking not in all frames, but just in text frames. Now the reason this is not going to effect the main running text is because that already has a object style applied to it. You can see it here on the object's styles panel. It's called text and that's something that we set up in a much earlier step. So the only text frames in this document, aside from the main running text, are the caption frames. I'll click Find Next just to be on the safe side, and then when I click Change, you'll see that the red plus indicating overset text disappears. Making sure that I'm searching the whole document, I can now click Change All, and all of our image captions are now addressed and we're not going to run into any problems of overset text in the future. So now that we have captions applied to all of the images and the captions grouped with the images we can anchor these groups within the text flow.

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