From the course: InDesign Secrets
206 Creating Intertwining Objects - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
206 Creating Intertwining Objects
- This effect where it appears that the two objects are intertwined always confounded me. Like, this part of the pink object is above that one, but it's below that one. How on Earth can you do that in InDesign? Well, I saw how my friend Mike Rankin did it and it was so easy that I just needed to show you. Mike is the author of another title here on the online training library called InDesign FX. And you definitely want to check that out. But let me show how this is done. I'm going to scroll down in this document so you can see that I have the same objects but this time not intertwined. One is just sitting on top of the other. Now obviously I could select this object go to the Object menu and then choose from the Arrange sub-menu. I could choose Send to Back or move to front but I cannot say move part of it below the other. It's all or nothing right? So instead I need to use a trick. And the trick is to use a second object. Here, let me show you. After I select this object, the black one in the background, I copy it to the clipboard. I'll just press Command-C, or Control-C on Windows. Then I switch to the Frame Tool. Now you can just press the "f" key on your keyboard but I'm going to select it here in the Tool panel. Then I'm going to draw out a frame where I want them to intersect. I simply drag out a rectangle, let go of the mouse button and now I have the frame on the page. Finally I'm going to go the Edit menu and I'm going to choose not Paste, but Paste Into. When you use Past Into, and the frame that your pasting into is in the same area as the object that you copied, it pastes it with the exact same location. It pin registers it. So look at that. The duplicate that I pasted into the frame, covers up the pink object and the result is that it appears that the objects are intertwined. Here let's do one more. I'm going to go to the next page in my document and I want to interlock these two O's. But before I do that, I'm going to make a copy of this object, you know just in case I mess something up. So I'll choose the selection tool and then I'll hold down the Option, or Alt key, and I'll drag this object down. That's just a little backup. I'll go back up here and choose that text frame and I'm going to convert this into Outlines by going to the Type menu and choosing Create Outlines. When I convert text to paths, what I get is one big complicated, compound path and I can pull that apart into separate paths by going to the Object menu, choosing the Paths sub-menu and then choose Release Compound Path. So of course now I have a bunch of separate paths but the counters inside the B and the two O's aren't holes anymore. It's just a bunch of paths. But that's okay, I can fix that. Let's go up to the Window menu, choose the Object & Layout sub-menu and then choose Pathfinder Now I'm going to select these two objects here, in this O and then I'm going to click on the Subtract button inside the Pathfinder panel. That knocks a hole in the one underneath. Let's go ahead and do the next one. And then I'll take care of the B. Just by dragging over those, so I select all three of those objects and then clicking Subtract. There we go, looks much better. Now let's go ahead and co-mingle those O's. I'm going to select both of these objects, over here and I'm simply going to drag these over to the left. I'm holding down the Shift key to constrain them horizontally. Now I'll deselect that, select this O and change its color so we can see it better. Let's make it pink. Great, now we're ready for the trick again. I'm going to select the object in the background, the black O, and copy it to the clipboard with Command-C or Control-C on Windows. Then I'll press the "f" key to switch to the Frame Tool and I'll drag out a little area where I want them to intersect. If you don't get the frame exactly where you want it, remember that you can hold down the Spacebar which let's you move the frame while you're dragging it. Here the Spacebar is held down, now I let go of the Spacebar and I can continue to drag. Let go of the mouse button, and I have the frame. Now all I need to do is go to the Edit menu, and choose Paste Into. Boom, it's done. And even better, these are all still separate objects right? So that means I can go back to my Selection Tool, click on the pink O, and then rotate it, or transform it in some other way. And you'll see that it still looks like the two O's are intertwined. Now of course, ultimately, we still have a bunch of separate objects. So if this object gets moved, uh, that doesn't look good. So let me undo that, with Command-Z, or Control-Z on Windows and now I'm going to select all of these objects then go to the Object menu, and choose Group. There we go. Now we get the effect we want and it won't get messed up if we later move it around.
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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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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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