Working with Frames
InDesign frames may contain either text or graphics. As you work with frames, you’ll notice that InDesign provides a great amount of flexibility and control over your design.
In this introduction to working with frames, you’ll learn how to do the following:
- Use the Selection and Direct Selection tools to modify frames and their contents.
- Resize and reshape text and graphic frames.
- Distinguish between bounding boxes and their frames.
- Crop a graphic.
- Scale an image contained in a graphics frame.
- Move a graphic within its frame.
- Convert a graphics frame to a text frame.
- Wrap text around an object.
- Create and rotate a polygon frame.
- Align graphic objects to each other.
- Center and scale an object within a frame.
Getting Started
In this lesson, you’ll work on a two-page article for a magazine about origami paper folding. Before you begin, you’ll need to restore the default preferences for Adobe InDesign to ensure that the tools and palettes function exactly as described in this lesson. Then you’ll open the finished document for this lesson to see what you’ll be creating.
- Delete or deactivate (by renaming) the InDesign Defaults file and the InDesign SavedData file, as described in “Restoring default preferences” on page 2.
- Start Adobe InDesign. To begin working, you’ll open an InDesign document that is already partially completed.
- Choose File > Open, and open the 03_a.indd file in the ID_03 folder, located inside the Lessons folder within the IDCIB folder on your hard disk.
- Choose File > Save As, rename the file 03_frames.indd, and save it in the ID_03 folder.
- To see what the finished document will look like, open the 03_b.indd file in the same folder. You can leave this document open to act as a guide as you work. When you’re ready to resume working on the lesson document, choose Window > 03_frames.indd.