Adding and formatting text

At this point, we're ready to start adding the structural elements to the parent pages. For our newsletter, the contents of our parent pages consists of text in different locations on the page; for the cover page, we'll have text at the top of the page that includes the newsletter's name and publication information, and the inside parent pages will have the newsletter's name at the top of the page and a page number at the bottom.

Before we get started working on the A-Cover parent page, let's take a moment to learn about a key piece of all InDesign documents: frames.

Working with frames

All of the content in an InDesign document lives inside of frames. Frames are simply containers that can hold text or graphic objects. Our pages are currently divided up into three columns, but we're not limited to including text only in those columns. If we want to break up the three-column layout with text or an image that spans the width of the page, we can create a frame of whatever size we need and position it wherever we want it on the page.

The first frame we'll create will span the top of the page and contain the newsletter's name — this feature is referred to as a nameplate in publication terms. Once we have the newsletter's name in place, we'll add the date and issue information as well.

There are a number of different tools we can use to make frames — we'll start out with using the Type tool to add the newsletter's name to the page.

Creating a text frame with the Type tool

The Type tool allows us to create and edit the contents of text frames. To create a frame with the Type tool, all we need to do is press and drag the cursor to create a frame of the size we need. For the name of the newsletter, we'll make a text frame that starts at the top left margin of the page, spans all three columns, and is 1.25 inches high. (When measuring with the grid, this works out to five grid squares high.) Once we have the frame created, we'll type in the newsletter's name.

At this point, we have a text frame with the newsletter's name in the upper left corner, as shown in the following image:

The text is rather small, though. We'll need to apply some formatting to the text to make it easier to read and help it stand out.

Formatting the appearance of text using the Character panel

InDesign provides a wide range of tools and options for formatting the text in a document, split into groups by what part of the text they focus on: individual characters of text and a paragraph of text as a whole. These options are accessible in a couple of different locations — we can access character- and paragraph-specific formatting tools in the Character and Paragraph panels respectively, and many of the character and paragraph formatting tools are also accessible through the Control panel.

Let's start out by applying some character formatting to the newsletter's name. We'll do that using the Character panel.

The Character panel appears:

Here, we can change the font and styling for the text as well as adjust the text's size, spacing, scale, and positioning. The first thing we'll do using the Character panel is change the font face and size— we'll change the font to Verdana Bold, and the size to 40 pt.

The name of the newsletter is now much easier to read. However, it's also too long to all fit on one line. We can fix this without changing the font size by adjusting the spacing between the individual letters to squeeze them all closer together.

Understanding tracking and kerning

When font designers create a typeface, they build in a default amount of space around each character. This space is intended by the artist to be the most effective distance between individual characters in a word. However, sometimes we need to make adjustments to that spacing in order to achieve a specific look — and in order to do that, we need to adjust the tracking and kerning of text.

Tracking refers to the space between characters in an entire block of text. Generally, tighter tracking (or less space) is appropriate for larger text, and looser tracking (or more space) works better with smaller text. The default tracking settings for body text are usually adequate, but with larger text, sometimes we may need to tighten the tracking between letters. The following image shows examples of how the font Benton Sans looks with different tracking values:

Kerning is similar to tracking in that it controls the space between characters of text. However, where tracking adjusts the spacing between all characters in a block of text, kerning adjusts the spacing between a pair of characters. With body text, we won't typically need to adjust the kerning between characters, but with larger text such as headlines, there may be instances where adjusting the kerning is necessary to remove awkward white space between two characters. The following image shows a before-and-after example of how the characters A and V look together with the kerning between the letters adjusted:

Changing the tracking value for selected text

To make the newsletter's name take up only one line of text, we'll adjust the tracking to bring the letters closer together. Tracking can be adjusted in both the Control panel and the Character panel — since we already have the Character panel open, let's use that to reduce the tracking for the newsletter's name to -50.

Now the name of the newsletter should all fit on one line, as shown in the following example:

NOTE: To adjust the kerning between individual characters (for example, after a capital T, where there may be some awkward open space between the T and the next letter), position the cursor between the two letters whose spacing you want to adjust and change the value in the Kerning () field.

Next, we'll work on the text's alignment inside the frame.

Adjusting text alignment

We want the name of the newsletter to be centered both horizontally and vertically within its frame. The horizontal alignment of the text can be changed using the paragraph alignment options, but to change the vertical alignment we'll need to work with options that focus on the entire text frame and not just one paragraph of text.

Let's start off by changing the paragraph alignment, then we'll adjust the alignment of the contents of the text frame.

Changing paragraph alignment using the Paragraph panel

We can change a paragraph's alignment in two places — the paragraph alignment options are available in both the Paragraph panel and the Control panel. Since we used the Character panel previously, let's explore the Paragraph panel as we center the newsletter's name horizontally.

The Paragraph panel collects all of the paragraph formatting tools in one panel, as shown below:

In this panel, we can adjust a paragraph's alignment and justification, change the indentation, adjust the space before and after a paragraph, and work with additional options such as hyphenation.

Let's use the paragraph alignment options to center the text horizontally. Afterwards, we can collapse the Paragraph panel to get it out of the way if we need to.

The text is now centered horizontally inside the frame.

Changing vertical justification of a frame with the Text Frame Options dialog box

Now that we've horizontally centered the text, let's learn how to vertically center the contents. This is done using the Text Frame Options dialog box:

The Text Frame Options dialog box gives us the ability to change many different options relating to a specific text frame, collected into categories based on what characteristics of the frame we want to modify. We'll only use the contents of the General category in this course, which contains options for adjusting the columns and the space between them in a text frame, changing the inset spacing —or space between the frame's content and the edge of the frame, the vertical justification of the frame's content, and whether or not the frame should ignore any text wrap settings of nearby frames.

Right now, our focus is on the Vertical Justification section of the dialog box. We'll be using the Align drop-down to change the alignment of the frame's content so it's centered vertically as well as horizontally.

The newsletter's name should now look like the following image:

Now we're ready to add information about the issue number and date to the nameplate. Before we do that, let's save our work so far.