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| October 2001• Vol.9 Issue 10 Page(s) 82-85 in print issue | |
Projects: InDesign Tools To Help Unlock Your Creativity |
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[INDESIGN]
 Adobe introduced InDesign with the intention of edging out
its impressive competitor QuarkXPress. While InDesign didn’t quite manage
that coup, it has proved itself a powerful desktop publishing program
that’s especially appealing to professional designers. Even if you’re not looking for professional-strength capabilities, InDesign is a good choice. It provides home and small-business users an all-in-one solution for their publishing needs. The following projects are just a few of the many desktop publishing tasks you can accomplish with InDesign.  Now Hear
This. If you have an important message you want to get out, or
if you are trying to advertise your business, one good way is to create a
catchy banner or logo. Creating a banner is easy with InDesign; it has all
the tools you will need, including the ability to import graphics, which
saves you the hassle of using a different graphics program. To start this or any project, you’ll need to create a new document by selecting New from the File menu. The New Document dialog box offers a number of different options for setting up your new blank document. In our example, we only needed a single page, so we went with the default “1” in the Number Of Pages box. For Page Size, Letter is fine (we’re really only looking for enough room to create the banner), and the default settings are fine for everything else. Click OK to proceed. Once you have the blank page set up, it’s time to import any graphics you want to include in your banner. Select Place from the File menu, and browse to the picture you want to use. Because InDesign does not come with its own clip art, you’ll have to find or create your own image to use. (We chose an image from our hard drive.) The image won’t automatically appear in your project; you’ll have to click and drag the image box to the appropriate size and location. To scale the image to a size that will work for your project, drag an edge or corner of the bounding box around the picture with the Selection tool while pressing the CTRL key. Pressing the CTRL and SHIFT keys while dragging will preserve the image’s proportions, while just using the Selection tool without pressing any keys will let you narrow in on a small portion of the image (crop it). Add text. When the image is the correct size, it’s time to add the text you want to include in your banner. Click the Type tool and click and drag to create your text frame. You can determine such characteristics as the font type and size using the Character palette. To change how the text will appear in relation to the frame, make your choices from the Paragraph palette. For our banner, we selected Trebuchet MS set at Bold Italic in 30-point font (all available on the Character palette) for the “Singer’s Dairy” text and Verdana 14-point font for the rest of the text. We set the first part, “From Our Farm To Your Freezer!,” to Bold Italic. Finally, align the text in the frame to the center by highlighting it and clicking the Align Center button on the Paragraph palette. To add a little background color to your text frame, select it and click the Fill Box. Then select a color from the Swatches or Color palette. You can use the same method for coloring text by first selecting the text itself instead of the frame. Before saving the banner, make sure you group the image and text together so they form one unit. Grouping objects is a great way to work with several objects as one, such as when you have a number of different graphic elements that have to stay proportional to one another. To group the picture and text, click the Selection tool, select both (hold down the SHIFT key and click each one), and choose Group from the Objects menu. Save the banner. Once you have things the way you want, be sure to save the document so you don’t lose all your hard work. One way to do so is obvious: select Save As from the File menu, give your banner document a name, and click the Save button. If you ever want to use the banner in another document, you can just copy it from its original location to the new document. However, there’s a better way to save something you’ll be using over again. If you know you’ll be using your banner in many future documents, save it to an object library. This will let you store it to a palette and then easily insert it into documents whenever you want. To do this, first create a new object library by choosing Libraries from the Window menu and choosing New from the submenu. Save the library as a document file when it prompts you, and then it will appear as a new palette to the program. Now add your completed banner to the library by dragging and dropping it to the palette. You can toggle the library on and off by selecting Show or Hide (followed by the library name) under the Window, Libraries menu. Put Your Design
Online. If you want to convey a message, a banner is useful,
but it’s not nearly as effective as a Web page. This project isn’t nearly
as difficult as you might think. We’ll show you how.
With the banner in position, you’re ready to turn your attention to the rest of the page. We used a short “bulleted items” list to highlight some of the primary points of our example business. To create this list, first select what images you want to use for the bullets. We copied a star from the ID_01 file that comes with InDesign; just locate the file in the LEARNING ADOBE INDESIGN\TOUR folder, then copy and paste it three times into your document. Manually drag the stars to where you want them on the page, select the Type tool, and drag out a box next to each star to create text frames. In one of the bullet text positions, we decided to go with a text-on-path effect, a nice bit of graphic manipulation you can do with just a little effort. First select the Pencil tool from the Toolbox and draw the shape you want the text to take. Then select the Path Type tool from the toolbox (select and hold down the Type tool until the pop-out menu displays the Path Type tool). Position the pointer over the path until a plus (+) sign appears and then click the path to start typing.
Adjust alignment. Now that the star, bullet text, and bullet text effects are all set, align the objects so they look good on the page. Open the Align palette from the Window menu, select all the items you want to align, and choose the alignment option you want. Once the objects are aligned, you can treat them as one by grouping them. If you want to keep others from editing your work, choose Lock Position from the Object menu. This will also lock the object in place within the document.
InDesign
Shortcuts. With few exceptions, you can perform just about any
task within InDesign without even touching the mouse. InDesign makes
excellent use of shortcuts; its Shortcuts Editor lets you easily view
shortcuts, generate a list of all shortcuts, edit or create new shortcuts,
and more.InDesign ships with two shortcut sets: a default set for InDesign, and a QuarkXPress 4.0 set. You can use the InDesign shortcut set with the Quick Reference Card that comes with the program for easy access to the most commonly used shortcuts. The QuarkXPress 4.0 set will be useful to anyone who uses QuarkXPress and is used to the workings of that program. You can easily switch between these sets by opening the Edit Shortcuts dialog box from the Edit menu and choosing a set from the Set menu. While you can’t edit the InDesign or QuarkXPress shortcut sets, you can use them as a base for your own set, which you can edit to your heart’s content. To create a new set, click the New Set button in the Edit Shortcuts dialog box, type a name for the set, and select a shortcut set to base it on. To view individual shortcuts, make a selection from the Product Area drop-down list on the Edit Shortcuts dialog box, then click an action in the Commands box. This will display the shortcut for the action in the Current Shortcuts box. You can change this shortcut by placing your cursor in the Press New Shortcut box and pressing the keys to which you want to assign the shortcut. Upon pressing the keys, InDesign will enter the combination in the Press New Shortcut box. If the keys you select are already assigned to another shortcut, InDesign will tell you, and you’ll have the option of replacing the combination with your own. To view or print a text file containing all shortcuts in a set, select the set in the Edit Shortcuts dialog box and click the Show Set button. Wrap text. To finish off the Web page, add a paragraph of text explaining the purpose of the Web page and a relevant graphic. To give your Web page a more professional look, you can wrap this text around the graphic. InDesign gives you several choices when it comes to how text will flow around graphics on the page. First type or import the text and then choose Text Wrap from the Object menu to open the Text Wrap palette. Use the Selection tool to select the text frame you want to wrap and then click a choice on the Text Wrap palette for the text shape you want. We went with the Wrap Around Object Shape option. Once you’ve chosen a type of wrap, select wrap offset values from the boxes at the bottom of the Text Wrap palette. These four values will determine how close the wrap is to the edge of the frame. Now import the graphic you want into your document and drag it into place in the text frame. The text should part and make room for the graphic. If you chose the Wrap Around Object Shape option, use the Add Anchor Point tool to add anchor points around the image frame. Then choose the Direct Selection tool to edit the boundary, allowing the text to more closely “hug” the image. Once this is done, it’s time to consider your color choices. Choose colors for the Web. Because people use different browsers and operating systems to access the Internet, colors won’t always appear the same to each person who views your Web page. One way around this is to use “Web-safe” colors, a collection of 216 colors that look the same regardless of what equipment a person uses to view them. To add Web-safe colors to your Swatch palette (essentially like your own personal box of crayons where you can store and easily access specific colors), open the Window menu and select Swatch Libraries, then choose Web. Double-click any of the colors present here (or choose Add To Swatch from the menu) to add the color to your Swatch palette. Because you have no idea if colors in imported graphics are Web safe, it is probably a good idea to convert any colors you can in your imported graphics (such as the color of the stars or the background of the banner text frame). Select the graphic or text frame in which the imported color appears (you’ll have to Ungroup the banner to click the text frame), click the Fill Box, and select a Web-safe color from your Swatches palette. Export to HTML. All that remains now is to export your document to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Many attributes will be exported over to HTML with no problems, although some, such as tracking, kerning, and paragraph rules, will not. Note that InDesign will add navigation links between pages, but you’ll have to add hypertext links yourself in an HTML editor. To export to HTML, choose Export from the File menu, enter a file name and location, and choose HTML from the Save As Type box. Click Save, and the Export HTML dialog box will open with options in the areas of graphics, Layout, and more. We left all the options here at their default settings. Click OK, and InDesign will save the document. Get The Word
Out. InDesign really shines when it comes to the creation of
longer projects such as magazine layouts and newsletters. We’ve chosen a
short newsletter project to demonstrate some of the more advanced things
you can do with InDesign.Because we want our newsletter to be two pages, we typed 2 in the Number Of Pages box in the New Document dialog box. We also typed 2 in the Number box in the Columns section. We left everything else at its default setting. Don’t worry about being locked into this right from the start; you can easily add a new page by selecting the Create New Page button from the bottom of the Pages palette, and you can add or subtract columns by selecting the page you want to change columns for (on the Pages palette) and choosing Margins And Columns from the Layout menu. Under Columns, type a new number of columns under Number and click OK.
Make it interesting. Once your text is in place, use some design tricks to kick it up a notch. To add a drop cap (those large letters or words that you’ve probably seen at the beginning of articles or chapters), position the cursor in the paragraph where you want to create the drop cap, open the Paragraph palette (select Transform from the Window menu), and enter a number in the Drop Cap Number Of Lines box (in the bottom left corner). This will determine how many lines down the cap will drop (we went with two). In the Drop Cap One Or More Characters box, enter the number of characters long you want the drop cap to be. Because we just wanted the one letter, we chose one.
Saving options. Once your newsletter is done and ready to be distributed, there are a number of different formats to which you can save it, depending on how you want to distribute it. One of the most versatile ways is to save it as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. When you save a document in this format, it retains its original formatting no matter what, so you can be sure your newsletter recipients will see the newsletter as you intended. All your target audience needs to view a PDF file is the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. To export a file to the PDF format, select Export from the File menu. From the Save As Type drop-down menu, choose Adobe PDF and select a file name and location for the file, then click Save. This opens the Export PDF dialog box, which gives you a number of options for Security, Compression, and more. We left everything in this dialog box at the default settings, but you can make changes according to your needs. Click Export to create the PDF file. You can now distribute your newsletter over the Internet, or through e-mail or hard copy.
More
Resources. These are just a few of the many things you can do
with InDesign. In addition to the excellent user guide that comes with the
program, you’ll find a wealth of other tips and helpful information by
visiting the Adobe InDesign Web site at http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/main.html.
by Rich Gray
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