From the course: Type Tips

Leveraging the power of text frame object styles

From the course: Type Tips

Leveraging the power of text frame object styles

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Nigel French, welcome to Type Tips. In this week's episode, I want to show you how we can really harness the power of Object Styles applied to Text Frames. I'm working on a coffee-table picture book, and I have here six spreads from that book, and I've placed the images. This is very much a picture-driven project. And I want to be able to place the text that goes with the images in a very quick and consistent way. So to do this, I can use Object Styles. Firstly, I should say that I'm working from pencil thumbnail sketches, so I have an idea of where I'm going. And I've created a grid and the different sizes of Text Frames that I'm going to use are all going to be suggested by this grid. Let me just turn on my Text Layer and you can see what I mean. So we have this opening Text Frame, and then we have a two-column Text Frame that goes above the images, a full page, or near full page, twp-column Text Frame. Two column Text Frame that goes beneath the images, a single-column Frame that goes on the outside of a left-hand page, and a single-column Frame that goes on the outside of a right-hand page. So I'm going to come and turn off that Layer, return to the beginning of my document. Now, using my thumbnails, I would experiment with the size and position of the Text Frames. So let's say right there is one that I like, and then I would come to the Object Styles panel, choose New Object Style, give it a name, and then capture its size and position. And I'm going to have height and width, x and y. So you need to be precise, and make sure that everything is exactly where you want it, then you create the Object Style. Once the Object Style is created, you can be quite sloppy with how you place the Text Frames, not entirely sloppy with how you place the Text Frames, because as soon as you apply the Object Style, they go to exactly the position that you want. Now you will have to create Object Styles for the left-hand pages, and Object Styles for the right-hand pages and one can be based on the other, but what this dialog here is lacking is a check box like we see in the Anchored Object Options to make the coordinates relative to the spine. All right, so with my Object Styles already set up, I'll place the text file, and now all I'm going to do is flow the text, making sure that I have a Text Frame on each of my pages where I want text. But I'm not worried about being accurate. I'm holding down the option or alt key so that I can continue the text flow. So I move to the next spread, continuing to hold down the option or alt key, and very quickly block out the areas of text. Now this is especially useful if you're working with a laptop and you're trying to be accurate, drawing text frames using a Track Pad. Not only is that a lot of wear and tear on your hands, but it's also very time-consuming and somewhat prone to error. So I'll move back to the beginning, and Select all of the text, come to my Paragraph Styles, and Apply a Style Sequence. So I'm going to come to the first Style in that Sequence, and then choose Apply then Next Style. And in other tips I've gone over the importance of Style Sequences and how to set them up. But now, and this is the point of this episode, now I'm going to Apply the Object Styles, and I've created a whole series of them. This one is called start, and it does that. And then we have, on the next spread, I have a 2 column top left, and a 2 column top right. This one is going to be a 2 column left. 2 column bottom left, 2 column bottom right, 1 column left outside, 1 column right outside. So very quickly, very consistently, very precisely, we can make sure that the Text Frames go where we want them to go by using Object Styles.

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