From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Stroking and filling frames and paths - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

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Stroking and filling frames and paths

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- [Instructor] I have my magazine file open from the exercise files folder, and I want to apply some color to this text frame on the first page. Now InDesign, just like Illustrator, let's you apply a fill or a stroke color to any object on your page. Even text. To do that, I want to come up to my control panel and use these little pop up menu widgets here. The top one lets you control the fill color. And the bottom one lets you control the stroke color. But right now, they're both set to none. That's what that red diagonal line means. So let's go ahead and fill this. I click on this little pop up menu and you can see a bunch of different swatches here. Registration looks like black, but it's not black, it's actually kind of dangerous to use this registration swatch. It's just for drawing crop marks on your page. Which you'll probably never need to do. So just ignore registration. Don't use it. Paper is what InDesign calls white. Let's just scroll down here and choose a different color. Maybe this cyan swatch. Then, to close the pop up menu, you can just press the escape key on your keyboard or just click anywhere else on your screen. Now, let's change the stroke. First, I'll apply the black color swatch. Then, let's look at this little pop up menu to the right. That's the thickness of the stroke. I'll pick something thick like six points. Now that's a solid black stroke. You can change the style of the stroke by choosing the pop up menu below that. There are all kinds of options in here. Let's just go ahead and pick this one here at the top called "thick thick." Now, the control panel is the fastest way to make all these kinds of changes. But I should point out that you can also make them over here in the swatches panel over in the dock. This gives you the same kinds of controls. In fact, it looks almost exactly like the pop up menus we saw in the control panel. But there's one big difference. And that's how do you choose between fill and stroke. It all has to do with this little icon in the upper left corner of the panel. Whichever icon is on top is the one that your changing. So right now, the stroke icon is on top. So if I choose a swatch, it's going to change the color of the stroke. If you want to change the color of the fill, you need to click on that icon and then that one comes to the top. Now we could change the color. For example, I'll pick this red color. You can also change the tint of this color. Let's come up here and click on the word tint. That's just a shortcut for selecting all the text inside that field. And I'll type say 50 and then hit return or enter. There we go. Now we got a 50% red color swatch for the background fill. I'm going to be covering colors and how to create new color swatches later on in the chapter. By the way, if you squint, you'll see another, tiny little icon up here in the upper left corner of the panel. It looks like a doubled headed arrow. You'll see the same thing at the bottom of the tool panel over here. That double headed arrow means swap the fill and the stroke colors. So if you click on that, it literally switches the colors. So what was the fill color, becomes the stroke color and vice versa. Now of course, that blacks not going to work, so let's choose a different fill color. Like paper. Okay, now as I'm looking at my beautiful masterpiece here, I noticed that something is strange, something's wrong here. The fill color kind of peeks out past this red line into the middle part. Here, let me zoom in. I'm going to hold down command space bar on the Mac or control space bar on Windows, and then drag to the right. You see that space in between the lines? That's called the gap of the stroke. And right now, the gap is set to none or transparent, so you can see right through it to the edge of that little bit of white sticking out. I don't like that so let's change it. And the way you fine tune your strokes is with the stroke panel over here in the dock. You can see down here that the type pop up menu is set to thick thick. And down at the bottom, the gap color is set to none. Now you could change this gap color to any of your other color swatches and that would fill it in. But in this case, I'm going to show you a different way to handle this. Instead of changing the gap color, you can change the alignment. In other words, where does this stroke sit on the path. And right now, you can see, that the alignment is set to the center of the path. But if you click over here on the third button in the align stroke area, you get a very different effect. Now, the stroke is aligned to the outside of the path. Click on the second one and it's aligned to the inside. I think that looks much better. By the way, if you ever need to make arrow heads, the stroke panel is also where you do that. You just draw a line and then use these controls down here to add an arrow head. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this movie, you can also apply fill and stroke to text. Let me show you how. First, I'm going to press command one or control one on Windows to jump back to 100% view. Then, I'll scroll over to the right. I'll switch to the type tool and I'm going to select just this E, this drop cap. And now actually, why don't I zoom in here a little bit by pressing command plus or control plus on Windows. Once again, I could fill this inside the swatches panel, or I could use the same fill and stroke widgets up here in the control panel. For example, I'll fill this with a different color, like blue. And remember how earlier I said you could swap the fill and the stroke? Well, why don't we do that? Over here in the swatches panel, I'll click that little double headed arrow. And now, I've got a dark brown stroke with a none fill. You can literally see right through that text. There is so much more that you can do with fills and strokes. And that's what I'm going to be covering in the rest of this chapter.

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