Creating independent text frames

In this section, we'll be adding more text frames to the newsletter in order to give the main article a headline as well as create space for the sidebar article that we'll be adding to the bottom of the front page.

We'll start out by creating a headline for the main article.

Creating a frame for an article's headline

As you've likely already noticed, the main article for our newsletter doesn't have a headline. Since we want the headline to be right underneath the nameplate, we'll need to use the Rectangle Frame tool to make this text frame, since the frame will end up overlapping the columns of text.

So far, we've used the grid and the rulers to help us size the text frames we create — however, that's not the only tool available to us as we create frames. When creating frames previously, you may have noticed a tooltip appear next to your cursor that looked similar to the following:

This tooltip tells us the exact dimensions of the frame we're creating, and appears when creating a frame with both the Type tool and the Rectangle Frame tool. If we already know the specific size we want a frame to be, we can use the tooltip to help us create a frame of the appropriate size. For the headline, we want a text frame that's 0.75 inches tall and 7.5 inches wide — as we're creating the frame, let's use the tooltip to help us make sure it's the size we need.

The newsletter should look similar to the following at this point:

We have a similar problem to the one we had earlier, when the text flowed over the nameplate. While we could resize the columns of text again to move the column tops underneath the headline, there's another way to move the text out from under this frame.

Working with text wrap

All frames in a document have the option to apply a text wrap to them — in other words, to indicate how text should flow around a specific frame. InDesign gives us a number of different text wrap options to work with.

We'll apply a text wrap to the frame we created so the text moves out from underneath it. Before we do that, let's open the Text Wrap panel and explore some of the options available there.

The Text Wrap panel appears on the screen:

There are many ways that text can be wrapped around an object, depending on the object's shape and composition. We can wrap text around the edges of a frame's bounding box or around the shape of an object; additionally, we can have text jump over an object in the text flow (with no text on the left or right side of the object) or jump to the next column or frame of text with no text appearing after the selected object. In addition to indicating how text should wrap around an object, the Text Wrap panel also gives us the option to adjust the spacing between an object and the surrounding text.

Applying a bounding box wrap

For the frame we just created, we'll wrap the text around the bounding box (which, in this case, is the frame itself). As part of this process, we'll also want to specify the offset, or spacing, between the bounding box and the surrounding text. This adds some space between elements on the page and helps avoid elements crowding each other. Since we don't want the article's headline to be jammed up against the text below it, we'll adjust the bottom offset spacing after the text wrap is applied.

Once the bottom offset is applied, the text moves away from the bottom of the headline frame. A light blue line appears 1/10th of an inch away from the bottom of the frame, indicating the bottom offset boundary of the text wrap. At this point, the headline frame should look like the following:

Adding and formatting the headline text

At this point, we can change the frame from an undefined frame to a text frame, then add the headline text to it and format the text. The headline we'll add consists of two lines (this is referred to as a stacked headline in publishing terms), and each line will be styled differently in order to help them stand out from each other slightly. Once the headline is styled, we'll center the text vertically inside the frame using the Text Frame Options dialog box.

The headline for the main article should now look like the following: