Text

Creating, editing and threading text frames, and where to change character and paragraph attributes.

Creating a text frame

1. Choose the Text tool (T).
2. Drag on the canvas to draw a frame.
3. The frame enters editing mode as soon as it is created, so start typing.

To put text inside a shape, click inside the shape with the Text tool. In a non-rectangular shape (ellipse, polygon, path) the text flows inside the shape's outline.

Every text frame shows a thin guide in the color of the level it belongs to (light blue by default), selected or not. Frames with a stroke show no guide. The small dot near the bottom of the right edge is the text's out port (see "Threading and overset").

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Entering and leaving edit mode

• Enter: double-click a text frame with the Select tool, or click inside the frame with the Text tool.
• Leave: press Esc or click an empty area outside the frame. Clicking between threaded frames does not leave editing.

The Character and Paragraph sections of the Attributes tab appear only while you are editing text (the panel title then changes to Text; with only the frame selected it reads Text frame); they apply to the cursor position or the selected characters and paragraphs. To change all the text in a frame, select it all with ⌘/Ctrl+A while editing, then change the attribute. With only the frame selected (not editing), the Text section shows just Vertical alignment and Content (see "Columns and inset").

Copy and paste while editing (⌘/Ctrl+C · ⌘/Ctrl+V) carries character formatting and paragraph formatting (alignment, indents, bullets) — into another frame or table cell as well. Text copied from another document links its styles by name to the styles of the same name in this document, and adds any style this document does not have. To paste only the characters in the formatting at the caret, use Paste without Formatting (Paste without Formatting) ⇧⌘V (Ctrl+Shift+V) or pick it from the right-click menu.

Text copied from other apps (Word, Google Docs, the web) is pasted in the font and size at the caret, with the bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, size and color that app recorded, plus paragraph alignment, lists (bullets, numbers) and headings. Font names are not brought over (there is no guarantee this document has that font). The other way round, text copied here keeps its weight, size, color and alignment when pasted into other apps.

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Forced line breaks and inline images

• Shift+Enter breaks the line without starting a new paragraph (a forced line break). The new line belongs to the same paragraph, so it gets no first-line indent, and in a justified paragraph the line before the break is not stretched. Copied to another app it becomes a line break.
• Emoji and extended Han characters can be typed, are displayed, and print in the PDF. The cursor steps over and deletes such a character as one character.
• While editing text, pasting a clipboard that holds only a picture (a screenshot, an image copied from another app) uploads the picture to the document and inserts it at the cursor as an inline object that moves with the text (see "Inline (anchored) objects" below).

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Inline (anchored) objects

You can put an object — a shape, an image, a group — into the text like a character. This is the "inline" kind of InDesign's anchored objects. The object moves along the line with the text, is pushed along when the text before it grows or shrinks, and can flow into the next frame.

Inserting

1. With the Select tool, select the object and copy it with ⌘/Ctrl+C. If you select several, they go in one after another.
2. Double-click the text frame to edit it and put the cursor where the object should go.
3. Press ⌘/Ctrl+V. A copy of the object is inserted at the cursor. The original stays on the canvas; delete it if you don't need it.

A picture copied in another app (a screenshot, for example) is uploaded to the document and inserted the same way when you paste it while editing. Pasting while editing uses whatever you copied last — if you copied an object and then some text, the text is pasted.

How it sits in the line

• The bottom of the object sits on the text baseline. If the object is taller than the text, that line grows to the object's height.
• A rotated object takes up the box around its rotated shape.
• An object wider than the text frame is not inserted; you see "The object is wider than the text frame and cannot be placed inline. (N)". Make the object smaller or the frame wider and paste again.
• The print PDF shows it in the same place as the screen.

Editing and deleting

• While editing, the object behaves like a single character: the arrow keys step over it in one move, one Backspace right after it deletes it (undo brings it back), and double-clicking it selects that one character.
• Copying text that contains an object and pasting it into another text frame takes the object along.
• An inserted object cannot be selected on its own, so its size, color or image cannot be changed in place. To change it, delete it from the text and copy the edited object from the canvas in again.
• In Find/Replace, the special character ^a finds inline objects (a code for the find box only). It works in both the frame-being-edited and the whole-document scope; replacing a match that contains an inline object deletes that object.

Not available

InDesign's anchored object options for "Above Line" and "Custom" positions (keeping the object outside the line, in the margin for example), baseline offset, and text wrap around an inline object are not available. An inline object always sits in its line like a character.

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Threading and overset

When a frame cannot hold all its text, it is overset: the out port dot on the right edge turns red. The dot has three colors.

To flow overset text into another frame:

1. Press the red port dot on the right edge of the overset frame (a gray dot if it is not overset). The frame does not need to be selected first.
2. Keep the button down and drag. A red line follows the pointer, and a frame that can receive the text gets a red outline while you are over it.
3. Release over the text frame that should receive the text. The two frames are threaded and the remaining text flows into the second frame. A blue in-port dot appears near the top of the receiving frame's left edge.

To abandon threading, release over an empty area. A frame that already holds text, a frame that already receives text from another frame, and a frame in the same story (the same set of threaded frames) cannot receive the text.

To break a thread, click a blue port dot (either the out port or the in port). The text stays in the earlier frame and the later frame becomes empty.

Selecting one of the threaded frames shows a light blue line between them so you can see where the text flows.

If you delete one of the threaded frames, or the page it sits on, the remaining frames are threaded together again and the text keeps flowing.

To see what the overset text is, right-click while editing the frame and choose Show Overset Text. A yellow box appears to the right of the frame showing the text that did not fit (in the whole thread) with its character count, and it follows your edits. Choose the item again, click the box’s ×, or leave editing to close it.

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Columns and inset

To split one frame into several columns or add space between the text and the frame edge, use the text box options.

1. Right-click the text frame.
2. Choose Text Frame Options….
3. Under Inset set the Top, Bottom, Left and Right spacing, and under Columns the Count and the Gutter between columns, in mm.
4. Under Vertical align choose Top, Center, Bottom or Justify. Justify widens the line spacing so the text fills the frame's height.
5. Click OK. You can undo it with ⌘/Ctrl+Z.

With two or more columns, the column boundaries are drawn as dotted lines inside the frame (on screen only; they do not print).

You can also change the vertical alignment with only the frame selected (not editing), using the Vertical buttons under Attributes › Text: Align top, Align center, Align bottom and Justify vertically — spreads lines to fill the frame.

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Character attributes

While editing text, use the Character section of the Attributes tab. It applies to the cursor position (the next characters you type) or the selected characters.

• Font, weight and Font size
• Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Superscript, Subscript, Small Caps
• Kerning and Ligatures
• Text color and Stroke — click the color well to open the color picker (see the "Color" article). Set the text color to None to leave only the stroke. The field below the stroke is Stroke weight (pt); join, alignment and miter are set in the character style settings dialog, which also holds the character background color (Color tab).
• Tracking (1/1000 em), Baseline Shift (pt), H-Scale (%) and V-Scale (%)
• Language — the language of this text. The hyphenation dictionary, the quotation marks typed, and regional glyph forms of Han characters follow it. Leave it at Auto (document language) to follow the document language.

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Paragraph attributes

While editing text, use the Paragraph section of the Attributes tab. It applies to the paragraph holding the cursor or to the paragraphs the selection touches.

• Alignment — Align left, Align center, Align right, Justify (last line left), Justify (last line center), Justify (last line right), Justify all lines. On facing pages, Align toward spine and Align away from spine align toward the spine or the outer edge.
• Bullets and Numbering — put a bullet or a number in front of the paragraph.
• Space before and Space after (pt), Leading — leading is a multiple (×) of the font size.
• First-line indent, Left indent, Right indent
• Drop cap — Drop cap height (lines) and Drop cap characters enlarge the first character(s) to span several lines.
• Align to baseline grid — snap lines of text to the document's baseline grid (see "Document settings").
• Tabs… in the Tabs row — opens the tab ruler (see "Tab settings" in the "Styles" article).
• Background and Border — a background color behind the paragraph and the color of a border around it. The border is 1 pt thick; to change it, use Background & Border › Border weight in a paragraph style.

Justification settings such as word spacing and the composer are not in this section; they are set only in paragraph styles (see "Style settings dialog" in the "Styles" article).

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Kinsoku and hyphenation

The Kinsoku and Line Breaks items of the Paragraph section.

• Kinsoku set — a set of rules for characters that may not start or end a line. Click Kinsoku Settings… to view the sets and copy one to edit. Built-in sets cannot be edited; copy them with New Set.
• Kinsoku type — when a forbidden character lands at a line boundary, either pull it into the previous line (Push in first) or push it to the next line (Push out first, Push out only).
• Hanging — hangs punctuation such as periods and commas at the end of a line outside the right margin. Choose None, Regular (only punctuation that does not fit on the line hangs) or Force (line-end punctuation hangs even when it would fit). When Kinsoku set is None, Kinsoku type and Hanging are unavailable.
• Mojikumi — the spacing set for full-width brackets, punctuation and character classes (Mojikumi in InDesign's Paragraph panel). It applies to the selected paragraphs; open Mojikumi Settings… to view the sets and copy one to edit. The default, Follow document language, adjusts spacing only in Japanese and Chinese documents.
• Korean line break unit — By word breaks Korean only at spaces (the convention in book typesetting); By character allows a break between any two characters. The default is By character.
• Hyphenate — when on, Latin words at the end of a line are hyphenated. Set the minimum Word length, the characters to keep Before and After of the hyphen, the number of Ladder hyphenated lines, and whether Capitalized and the Last word may be broken. Break points follow the text's Language — English (UK) uses British rules, every other language US English rules, and with [No Language] words are not broken.

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Text on a path

Places text along a line or the outline of a shape.

1. With the Text tool, click on the outline of a shape or path (clicking inside makes a normal text frame instead).
2. Type the text.
3. Choose the shape in the Type on a Path section of the Attributes tab: Rainbow (characters rotate along the curve), Stair step, Skew, 3D ribbon or Gravity.
4. Choose which part of the characters sits on the path with Baseline, Ascender, Descender or Center, and use Flip to put the text on the other side of the path.

Select text on a path with the Select tool and handles mark where the text starts and ends. Drag them to move the span the text occupies.

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Undo

While editing, ⌘/Ctrl+Z undoes what you just typed. When there is no more typing in that frame to undo, it leaves editing and goes on to undo the earlier object-level action, such as moving or resizing the frame. After leaving editing, ⌘/Ctrl+Z undoes object-level actions. Adding, editing, deleting, importing (Load), redefining and renaming styles, and editing kinsoku sets, are also undone with ⌘/Ctrl+Z. If an undo while editing shortens the text so that it moves to another frame, the cursor moves to the frame that now holds that text.

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Find/Replace

The Find/Replace panel opens in two scopes.

• While editing a text frame, right-click › Find/Replace… (or ⌘/Ctrl+F) — searches only that frame (the whole story if it is threaded).
• The Find/Replace — whole document (Ctrl/⌘+F) icon in the top bar (⌘/Ctrl+F when not editing) — searches every text frame, table cell and master page in the document, in order.

1. Type the text to find in Find. The number of matches shows on the right as “n / m”. The clock button next to the box (Recent searches) lists what you searched for recently in this browser, most recent first; pick one to put it in the box. The Replace box has the same button (Recent replacements), and Clear history at the bottom of the list clears it.
2. Enter (or ▼) goes to the next match, Shift+Enter (▲) to the previous one. If the match is off screen (e.g. in a frame the story continues into on the next page), the view scrolls so that frame is visible; in whole-document scope the editor opens the frame holding the match for editing with that text selected.
3. Type the new text in Replace and click Replace to replace only the currently selected match and move to the next. Replace All replaces every match in the scope at once and shows how many were replaced.
4. Match case, Whole word and Regex can be turned on. Whole word matches only where no letter or digit touches the match on either side (Hangul counts as letters, so “포도” is not found inside “포도의”). With regex, $1 in the replacement stands for the first captured group.
5. Drag the panel’s title bar to move it (this browser remembers the position); Esc closes it. Pressing ⌘/Ctrl+F again while the panel is open keeps the search text and moves to the find box.

Special characters such as tabs and paragraph ends are written with the same codes as InDesign. The Special characters button (@) next to each box opens the list; picking an item inserts its code. With regex on, use regex syntax (\t, \n) instead of codes.

Putting ^p in the replace box splits the paragraph there.

Replace All is undone with a single ⌘/Ctrl+Z. Characters inside text variables such as page numbers are skipped by find (see “Page numbers and text variables” in the Pages document).

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