From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

Modify text frames - Publisher Tutorial

From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

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Modify text frames

- In this movie, we'll look at some of the ways you can modify text frames in Affinity Publisher. While there are some text frame controls you can access in the context toolbar, there are much more in the text frame panel. So I'll open that by choosing view, studio, text frame. And I'll select text frame on the first page of my document. And there are four sets of controls in the panel, starting at the top with general. Here you can do things like set the stroke and fill colors, and the stroke style. So I'll apply a white fill to my text frame. And a one-point stroke using my brown color swatch. Next, I'll apply an inset which creates space between the edges of the frame and the text inside it. I'll add 24 points of inset on all sides. Next is columns, which we looked at in the movie on working with columns. And then we have vertical alignment. So the text can align to the top of the frame, the center, the bottom, or it can be vertically justified, which spreads out the text so it always fills the height of the frame. And you can see that it stretched out the letting in the paragraphs, in effect over-riding the letting that I had set. If you don't want this, you can increase the max paragraph space value so the extra space is only added between paragraphs. I'll hold the shift key and click the up arrow a few times to quickly increase that value to 40 points, which restores my letting. I also like the centered text best so I'll go back to that. And finally we have the baseline grid. You can use this to override the document baseline grid. I'll turn it on and start it at exactly the top of the text frame, and put a grid line every 12 points. And if I turn it off and on you can see the affect it has. And I can see this grid if I go to the view menu and choose "show baseline grid" and zoom in closer. If you have the document baseline grid turned on in the baseline grid manager, then you'll see both that and the text frame baseline grid at the same time. I'll zoom back out. And note that when you adjust any settings in the text frame panel, they become your default settings for new text frames. So if I go to my next page, and take the frame text tool, and drag out a new frame and it has the attributes I just set on my other frame, including the fill and stroke, the inset, and the centered alignment. Now if I don't want this, I can go back to the default settings by clicking the revert defaults button in the toolbar. Note that the baseline grid is not part of the defaults, and needs to be turned off separately. But now the frame I have selected and any new frames I make will have no stroke and no fill, no inset, be top-aligned and so on. If I want to use the appearance of the frame on the left hand page as my default again, I can select it and click the button in the toolbar to synchronize defaults from this selection. And now, when I drag out a new text frame, it will have the white fill, the brown stroke, and so on. And it even uses the first text style that was used in the frame I synchronized from. I'll click the button to go back to factory defaults. And note that you can also make the appearance of text frames consistent by simply copying and pasting the style from one frame to another. For example, I can select my frame on the left-hand page, choose edit, copy and then go to the next spread in my document. Select the text frame and choose edit, paste style. And the text has the same style as the first paragraph in my other frame, and I have the same inset, stroke and fill, etcetera. So in this movie, we looked at how to modify text frames as well as how to change the default settings for new frames, and how to copy and paste just the style from one text frame to another.

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