From the course: InDesign for the In-House Designer

Using text wrap - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign for the In-House Designer

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Using text wrap

- [Instructor] Once again, I've opened up a document that needs fonts from Typekit, but now I know how fast I can fix that. I just click on See Fonts, wait a couple of seconds, fonts are downloaded and activated, and then I can just click Close and then I'll be ready to go. There. In this document, we're going to explore Text Wrap, which is a way we can have objects interact with text in sort of interesting ways. I want you to get your Zoom tool and zoom in on this right hand page. There are three pages across, part of a brochure. Choose your black arrow and click on this frame that's sort of floating on top of this text and covering up the text so that you can't read it. Let's do something a little more interesting, than just putting it over here and putting it out of the way. Let's move it in so this shape is about halfway into this vertical image on the right. So it's just sort of hanging out of it. And make sure that it covers up some text because that's kind of the whole point here. We want it interacting with the text, we want the text shaped around it. And to do that we use Text Wrap. And that's a panel, which is of course available under the Window menu. So go to Window, and there it is down in the Ts, Text Wrap. So chose that and with this object selected, that first icon is indicating that there is no Text Wrap, meaning that the text goes where it wants to, and it doesn't interact with this shape at all. Choose the second icon, wrap around bounding box. So, you know that this is in a circular frame. Why is it pushed away from that in a rectangular fashion? Well bounding box is sort of an odd concept, it's the smallest imaginary rectangle you can draw around a selected shape. And this just sort of the way graphics programs think. So it's looking at that imaginary rectangle and pushing the text up against that. Text isn't covered up now, it isn't all that interesting. Be kind of nice to have that text wrap around the curve of this shape. So go for the third option, wrap around object shape. So you can see that it's now not hidden, but what's going on here? It's looking for an image inside this frame that it could wrap around, but that's not what we're going to do in this frame. Hold that thought, we're going to look at that in a little bit. But we want it to wrap around this shape, but an eight of an inch is not much of a push back. So put your cursor in that field that reads .125 inches, an eighth of an inch, and just hit your up arrow. I think it's great to use the arrow keys to sort of experiment. And it sure saves you some typing. So hit your up arrow, there I think that might do it. And wrap to both right and left sides. Well, there isn't anything on the right side, so we sort of get the same result no matter what. Same as Clipping, we don't have a clipping path on this artwork that's inside, so not pertinent here. But here's an interesting thing, that secondary line that you see, that thin red line, is not another object, it didn't grow another circle to push the text away, it's an indicator of the Text Wrap setting. But you can interact with it, this is kind of neat. Get your white arrow and look really closely, 'cause these little controls are tiny. And see that little anchor point there? And when you hover over it, you see how your cursor sort of wakes up. If you get right on top of that anchor point you'll see a square by your little arrow head, and that's says oh you're on top of an anchor point, and look what you can do. You can actually grab that and you can edit the shape of that wrap. So you can do crazy things here, often by accident. So it's not just an indicator, it is a tangible form that you can interact with, just keep in mind it's not actually a seperate shape. So much for that. Got your black arrow, click an empty space. And if you look up here you'll see some white text, and part of it's hanging out into the page, so of course you can't see it on top of the white page. Grab that frame, and it's really meant to live inside this circle here. So just grab that text frame, move it down on top of the circle, and it centers nicely. Let's hear it for smart guides. Let go of your mouse, and oh, what happened to our text? I want you to think of Text Wrap as being sort of like oil and water. The Text Wrap setting is oil and the text is water. And it's pushing the text away. And it goes through stacking order. So any text frame above that circle, and anything below it is going to be affected. So what can we do? It'd be really nice to see that text in there. Don't worry, there is a way. We have to tell this frame, containing the text, that it doesn't have to play along. So with that little text frame selected, go up to Object, Text Frame Options, and that is a dialog that you're going to frequently visit. So remember where it is. Choose Text Frame Options. And this is sort of hiding in plain sight at the lower left, Ignore Text Wrap. And Preview should be already checked. If it isn't, check it. Ignore Text Wrap. Ah, there's our text. So to me this gives you best of both worlds. You can have text pushed away by a shape and then you can have text on top that ignores that Text Wrap, and that can be kind of a cool device something like a pull quote. You might want to have an illustration sort of ghosted back in the middle of the document, and then you want a pull quote on top of it, even though you have Text Wrap on the artwork, you can have the text on top. Let's look at some other approaches. Scroll over to the left to the first panel, might need to push your Text Wrap panel out of the way. Get your black arrow and click this sort of sunburst shape down here. And drag that on top of, oh, this left hand column. You can see through it a little bit because it's been set to have less than 100% opacity. If you go over here to the right and click on your Effects panel, and wake that up, you'll see that the opacity is 62%. That can be kind of a need effect too, to have objects interact with each other, and we're going to explore this more later. But it's another one of those things that isn't much trouble, but it looks like you worked really hard. So you can close the Effects panel and get that out of the way. What we're going to do here with this shape is we're going to explore the different kinds of Text Wrap so you understand how they work. Right now, of course we have no Text Wrap. Go over to your Text Wrap panel and choose the second option, wrap around bounding box, and you've already seen that. Now for the third one, first before we switch, notice the color of your selection, it's this magenta. It's in a layer whose key color is magenta, so it's edges are magenta. It's showing you where the frame is. Now choose that third option, wrap around object shape. You see how it changed? The tool tip for this, I think, doesn't fully tell the story. Wrap around object shape, like well isn't this shape of the object a rectangle? It would be except, what's inside is an empty background. This is something that was created in Illustrator. And it's all empty up to the little scalloped edges of the little sun shape. The reason that the color of the selection changed is it's now looking inside and it's interrogating that artwork to see what's going on with it. And here's how we can prove that. Where it says Contour Options, down at the bottom, Type Bounding Box, click on that and instead choose detect edges. See how the text sort of runs in, and this is kind of clunky and it's kind of hard to read, but come up here where it says zero for the outset, how far it's pushing the text out, put your cursor in that field and hit your up arrow, and if you just do it once you'll start to see what's really going on. Go ahead and do it twice. Now this is big text and we're trying to get it to tuck in the little curves here, and so it's a little clunky. But hopefully gives you the idea of what's going on. And you can see there's that concentric scallop, and it's based on the shape of that Illustrator art. So InDesign can kind of communicate with that Illustrator art and see what's going on and generate a Text Wrap for that. And once again, you can edit this if you want to. You can get your white arrow and you see all those little anchor points, and you can shoot an afternoon trying to edit this to get everything to fall just where you want it, but just know that this is editable. Switch back to your black arrow, click an empty space, just so we get a fresh start, click on the frame and go back, and let's just sort of clean house and choose No Text Wrap. Okay. So now you know what the second one does, wrap around bounding box. The third one, wrap around object shape, you know now that if there's artwork in there on an empty background, on a transparent background, it'll dig into the frame and start working with the artwork itself. But let's go back to that second one, wrap around bounding box. You can make this a negative number. Put your cursor in one of the fields, they're linked together by default. If you hit your down arrow you can actually pull that text in on top. That's a little weird in this case, but the day may come when that's kind of handy. Let's just go for zero. What we're going to do now is we're going to explore the Wrap Options. Notice it says both right and left sides. Well click that hold down and say well we just want text on the right side of this. See what it does? They make pretty good sense. Just the left side. Both left and right, which is default. Side towards spine. Which in this case would be the right edge of the page, so this is a little odd that we're getting this result. Largest area. So I have to say in all my years of using Text Wrap I have never used largest area, but hey, it's there if you need it. Let's say both right and left sides though. I think that's going to work for what we're going to do next. Let's look at the fourth option, 'cause we already know what the third one does, the fourth option is jump object. So the text stops north of the object, and then picks back up south. And if you'll take a moment and look at the icons for these Text Wrap options, this one at least makes sense, I think. It looks like what it does. Now choose the next one, jump to next column, the text stops north of it and then continues in its next opportunity, which is the next column. And you can see as you move it around the text sort of follows. Again, that oil and water metaphor. Now this is kind of a fun one. Put this on top of the right hand frame and let's go back to the second Text Wrap option, wrap around bounding box. Choose Invert, click on that and watch what happens. So it stops north of it, and then it comes down to the area of the bounding box, and the text actually goes inside. So it's sort of negative Text Wrap, if you want to think of it that way. This is another one of those things that I think is really cool and I have never once used, but I think it's good for you to see it. You never know, the time may come when it's just the perfect answer to what you need. So let's uncheck Invert, and I think for this one we go back to our third option, which is wrap around object shape. And it remembers, which is kind of interesting that we chose Detect Edges, so it automatically picks that up again. Now there's some weird stuff going on. You see how it's breaking up this line really oddly, and you're going to run into that too, and the time's going to come when you have to really fiddle with that position of the shape, the amount of outset that you're inducing on it, and you may even have to scale the shape down. Or you may have to manipulate that little indicator. So don't forget, if you need to tweak it, go back to the white arrow, and when you click on it, you're going to see all bazillion little points there, but you can move them around if you want to. So this is an overview of what you can do with Text Wrap and don't forget, one of the coolest things, and one of the things that will frustrate you if you forget it. Don't forget that you can tell a text frame that it can ignore Text Wrap, and that let's you stack things up however you want. And you can get some really interesting results by doing that.

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