From the course: InDesign Secrets
175 Making captions easy (ignore text wrap object style library item live caption) - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
175 Making captions easy (ignore text wrap object style library item live caption)
- [Voiceover] Let's talk about how to make working with captions easier in your documents. We're looking at a single page here, part of a magazine spread. With the typical issues that occur when you're trying to create nice looking captions and make the entire page design look consistent from page to page. The way this document is constructed is we have a number of layers. The captions are on their own layer, above Master Page items and pictures, and the text is at the very top. So, when I'm trying to select a picture, if I click right on it, I select the text. I'm always going to have to click over here to the left. And you'll see that the pictures have a text wrap applied to them. If I open up the text wrap panel, this one has one pica all the way around, but the designer added six picas at the bottom in order to push the text away, because you can see that the text actually takes up the entire height of the live area. Now here is a caption, let's zoom in a bit, that we want to put underneath this image. So, zoom out and close text wrap. We're just going to drag this right on over. And oh! It disappears. Experienced InDesign users know what's happening with this, but I hear from clients all the time that this drives them crazy. Why is my text disappearing? It's because it's being pushed away by the text wrap. It makes no difference which layer an object is on. Its text wrap affects all other layers above and below it. But it's very simple to fix this. With the text frame selected, go to the object menu. Go down to text frame options, or just press Command or Control B, and turn on this option here, Ignore Text Wrap. Now the type comes right back into view. We still have to apply the correct paragraph style, which is Caption. There we go, that looks pretty good. One thing that bothers me is all this white space on this caption frame. So, I'm just going to double click the bottom handle to snap it out. Let's do the same thing for this caption, which already has some text wrap applied to it to push the text out of the way below it. Going to drag and drop this right on top. And you see how the text got pushed out, because this image has just one pica text wrap. So again, we need to select this guy, press Command or Control, Shift, B, turn on Ignore Text Wrap. There it is. And because all the type is using the same paragraph style, we can just leave the entire text frame selected and choose the caption paragraph style. We just did two of these. If we had to do 50 of these in the entire document, we should make an object style for these caption text frames. An object style can contain all of the settings that we just did plus more settings. Here's one, for example, that I might do. I want the text to be the same distance from the bottom of the picture in every instance where I use a caption. So, for this text frame, I'm going to bring down a bit, then go to Text Frame Options and set a fixed baseline, meaning a distance from the top that the text should start. I could have also chosen a top inset, but I'm just used to this method, so I'm going to say I want at least one pica of space offset from the top. And as long as I do that for every caption frame, they'll always have the same amount of distance. Let's turn this formatted one into an object style. With it selected, I'm going to open up my Object Styles panel, and hold down the Option or Alt key, and click on New Style, which opens up a dialog box that lets me name it. And I'm going to call it caption-default. Over here under Basic Attributes, it's picking up all of the settings I had for my selected caption frame. But it doesn't always pick up the paragraph style options, so I click that to turn on the checkmark, and I'm going to make sure that it uses the caption style automatically. Under Text Frame General Options, I'm want to make sure it picked up the fact to Ignore Text Wrap, and under Baseline Options, that it's fixed with the one pica offset from the top. I don't need it to pick up if the caption has text wrap or not, so I'm going to turn that off, and I'll apply that on a case-by-case basis. I also like using this, Text Frame Autosize Options, for my captions. I always want the caption to grow in height as I add more text from the top. We'll see how that works in a bit. So, now let's go ahead and apply Caption Default to our caption frames. And it's working perfectly. You see that it's kept the text wrap, if there was already text wrap applied. It did not add one, that's why I turned it off. And if I happen to add more text to this caption... I'm just adding some gibberish text. You see how the text frame automatically grows, so I don't have to have an over set. That's because I had Autosize turned on. One last thing, if you have gone to the trouble of setting up this fantastic object style, you should share it. Create a library for your company or for yourself. Put it on your desktop and call it, maybe, Magazine, and add things that you use in the magazine all the time, like your caption object style. I'm going to name it Caption. Now, when I go to a new document that also needs captions, I can drag that and drop it in here, and that style gets added to this new document. So, now I can put this caption over here. Let's apply some text wrap. And then in the Object Style, turn on Caption Default. And it applied the correct settings for the caption frame and the paragraph style for the caption itself. I just have to go back and fiddle around with the text wrap to push this off. So those are a whole bunch of ways to make working with captions a lot easier in InDesign. Take a lot of time in setting up one perfect one, and then make an Object Style out of it.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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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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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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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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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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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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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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