From the course: InDesign Secrets
150 Rotate text inside a frame, or the frame around the text - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
150 Rotate text inside a frame, or the frame around the text
Everyone knows you can rotate a text frame, to any angle you want. For example, I'll select this text frame here, go up to the Control Panel, and change it to say, ten degrees. Hit Enter and the entire frame rotates. But it's not just the frame, of course, the text inside the frame rotates too. But what if you want to rotate the frame, and not the text? Or what about rotating the text, but not the frame? You can do both of those things in InDesign. But in both cases, you have to be a bit clever to pull it off, and pay attention to which tool you're using. Let's undo this by pressing Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z on Windows. Remember that the selection, the black arrow tool, that first tool in the tool panel, always rotates both the object and anything inside the object. But the second arrow, that white arrow, that direct selection tool. That just changes points on a path. So, if I head over there, and select that tool, the direct selection tool. The frame changes slightly. I've now selected the points, on that path. Now, if I go up to the control panel, I get a completely different effect. If I change this to ten degrees, and hit return or enter, you'll see that the frame changed. It rotated, but the text did not. I only changed, the rotation of the frame, itself. That's kind of an interesting effect. Let's go ahead and click off here in the paste board, and go into preview mode by pressing the W key. And you can see that you can see, that you have a very different look to your text tray. Now what about rotating the text, and not the frame? Well, let's undo that with a Cmd+Z or a Ctrl+Z on Windows, and this time I'm going to select the selection tool, the black arrow tool. Make sure that the frame is selected. And I'm going to rotate it ten degrees. I've rotated both things. We saw that just a moment ago. But, now I'm going to take one additional step. I'll hit the A key to go back, to the direct selection tool. I'll go back to the control panel, and change this to minus 10 degrees. So I've rotated both the frame and the text ten degrees, and now I'm going to go back and rotate just the frame minus 10 degrees. In other words, it sets the frame back to the way it was. But the text remains at ten degrees. Let's click off here in the paste board, and we can see the effect. Now, I'm not saying you ought to do this to your text. I'm just saying you can. And it's really cool that you can in InDesign. And both of these tricks actually make sense, when you remember that text frames don't have to be plain or rectangles. You can manipulate frames, just like a regular path that you draw with a pen tool. Text frames are just paths. Paths that are closed, and have text in them.
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Contents
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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