135 Fitting text to a specific size

We are looking at a foldout of a brochure here and take a look at this type on the cover of the brochure, this would be the flap that falls over, if you are like me you might have looked at this frame right here, and wondered, is that live or is that Memorex? No, you wondered, is that live type, or is that a placed image, like from Illustrator. Well, if I double click inside of it, you can see that in fact it is live type. And I want to show you a nice little series of moves that you can do to quickly create any kind of multi line, headline or subhead or caption, to get this kind of artistic effect in your work.

So, I'm going to go over to the before, without started. We zoom in. The first thing you need to do of course is get the coloring and put in line breaks, where you want everything to break,. So, these are just soft line breaks here. Now, what would be great would be, is if we could tell InDesign please expand the size of this type to fit the frame. And if so fitting, you think O!, let's go to the Object menu, go to Fitting, where is the Fit Content to Frame? Not available for type frames, only available for image frames. So that's a feature request.

Instead, let's do a few other things. First, let's fit the frame to the content. And we could've chosen it from that menu, or my favorite way is, just to double click one of these handles. The way that I remember which handle to double click, is you double click on the handle opposite of the one, that you want to stay in place. So we want this handle to stay in place, we don't want it to move. So we go to the opposites, and we double click. There we go. It didn't quite get as tight as I wanted, so we're going to have to actually drag it in a little bit more ourselves.

And let's zoom in a bit with Cmd+ or Ctrl+, yeah, that's close enough. Now, the next thing that you want to do is you want to get the leading solid. I'm going to click inside with my type tool, press Cmd or Ctrl+A and then, I'm just going to use Option+ Up arrow or Alt+ Up arrow on Windows. To squeeze that leading up. I read a tip a few years ago that helps me keep this straight whenever I'm manipulating leading with the keyboard. Because we're actually reducing leading here, but we're using the up arrow key. So it's really hard to remember how that works.

Well, if you think of the Alt or Option up arrow key as pulling a window shade up, that's what happens when you're adjusting the leading. Everything's moving up. If you want it to move down, then you'd press the down arrow key. So think of that selection as a window shade. I don't why that's always helped me. So that's pretty good. That's kind of, like, kiss fit right there. Let's zoom out a bit. And now what we're going to do is we're going to scale the type. We're going to switch to the selection tool. Scaling type is different than just resizing the frame. If we resize the frame, we would just drag the frame back out.

But we want the type to change size as we drag the frame out to proportionally fill the frame the same as it is right now. So to do that, hold down the Shift and the Cmd key or the Shift and the Ctrl key on Windows, and then press and drag on any handle, preferably a corner handle. And as we drag it out, it changes size. Now I'm going to undo for a second, and try that again. But, this time I'm going to pause before I drag. So, that we can see the type grow as we go. Which is the way that I prefer to do it. See sometimes you have to pause so you can see the contents change as you go.

Now this was about how wide it was in our final. Let's take a look at the final. See where the, right edge is? Yeah, that's about it. Now how do we get this type though to go all the way to the end, as this is? Do we have to deal with Kearning and tracking no, we just do forced justify for all of the type in here. So with this entire frame selected, because we want all the type to be forced justified. Let's switch to the Type Tool, and the paragraph commands. And then we want this option right here, Justify all Lines.

There we go. So, all of the type moves out to the right. Very close, except we have a problem right here. We need this type to be spaced out. Again, we can get InDesign to do that for us. We replace this regular space with a non-breaking, fixed-width space. Got that? Got to the Type menu. Go down to insert white space. You want non breaking fixed width and let me show you the difference. If you just choose Nonbreaking Space, nothing really much happens. But if you chose Fixed Width, then it treats the space as it were a letter.

It cannot change its width. And then it's going to divvy up the white space that it needs to among all the characters, including that space character. Watch. There you go, now let's deselect and go to preview, perfect. Is it art or is it live type, it's live type with the help of a bunch of great features in Indesign.