223 Forcing chapter names down from the top with a style

- By default in InDesign when you put text inside of a frame the text starts at the very top and then goes down. And the top of the text hits the top edge of the frame. What if you wanted the frame to stay where it was but you wanted the text to start further down? Well there are bad ways to do it and better ways to do it and best practices. That's what I want to talk about in this video. A bad way to do it, unless, you know, you're just doing a single frame on a single page document is to hit return a bunch of times.

And the reason that's a bad way is because it's a lot of work assuming your doing this to a bunch of frames in your document. You have to go to each single frame and add this and also it's not included in a style. So if you export it to another format your going to lose that spacing and it's hard to modify if you decided, after you looked at it and Print Preview, that it was too much space you'd have to go back to every single instance and resize those empty returns manually, so on.

So there is a couple ways to work on this and one is to edit the settings for the first paragraph in that frame or to edit the frame itself. Now one thing that you might be thinking of was, "Oh, I'll just add space above." So in this paragraph on the right I'll go to the Paragraph controls to space above right here and I'll start adding space above but nothing is happening. Is my control broken? Let me try it in a different paragraph, hit up. No, no, it's working just fine. The problem, of course, is that InDesign rightly ignores space above settings when it's the first paragraph in the frame because it's thinking, "There's no way "she possibly wants me to go down, it applies to other frames." So that's not going to work.

Instead, in this instance, I might try changing the settings to the frame itself. So in the frame if I select the frame, and I go to the Object menu, and go down to Text Frame Options, and I'll scooch this guy over and turn on Preview. We go down to Baseline Options and here you can see that the text is set to start with the ascent of the typing and the top of the capital letters to be even with the top of the frame.

But if I wanted that to be a little bit more I could set this to be maybe 8 picas. And now it's set to start 8 picas from the top. This is not something that you can save into Paragraph Style obviously because I'm not editing a Paragraph Style. But it is something that you can save in a Object Style. So you can create an Object Style with the text frame's first baseline is set to start a certain distance from the top. And that would work out really well. Let's take a look at another page in this document.

Let's say that I want, in the beginning, this subhead to start at the top of this next column but be pushed down a little bit. I can do that. First of all I'm going to move it to the top of the next column by clicking in from of the word "In". And there we go. And then entering a break here, column break. So that's at the top. Of course you don't want to hit return a bunch of times to force this to the top. We all know that, right? Because that will bite you in the end if you try to edit and you end up with empty spaces by accident.

Now here I can select this frame and go ahead and do the same setting with the Text Frame Options dialog box but notice that this story is threaded between three separate frames. So this is not going to work if you had one frame with three different columns. That won't work, you have to select the frame itself and then you go to Text Frame Options. Just wanted to give you that little caution. So we come over here and you can actually choose any of these. What I like to do if I'm trying to create an Object Style is choose Fixed. And then from Fixed I'll go ahead and create a setting.

That's kind of fun that "In the beginning" is appearing at the top. Let's go ahead and move this down. Let's just say 2p, there we go. I think it's appearing at the top because we have baseline grade turned on for this. Let's take a look at something a little bit more complicated. Here we have a story, Alice In Wonderland, where it's one story that threads throughout the entire document. I have Show Text Threads on so you can see that. Let's say that in the chapter openers we would like this chapter number and the rest to appear further down.

I could create, as we just did, a Object Style and apply it to the chapter opener for every single chapter opener in this document. But if there's 30 chapters, you know, that's kind of a lot of work. Instead, what would be better here would be to edit the Paragraph Style. Every time a new chapter starts the very first paragraph is this chapter number. If we look under Paragraph Styles it's called "Chapter number space". There we go.

What can we do to make the chapter number space appear further down? We're going to apply a little trick with Rule Above. Let's go ahead and double click this to open it and move it over a bit so we can see better. Now, Paragraph Rule Above is right here and let's just do a Rule Above that is the default. So the default is that Offsets are 0. So the Rule Above is turned on and the color is usually the text color. So this is normally what a Paragraph Rule Above looks like.

So the tip here is to first of all change the color of the Rule Above to None and to change the Offset to however much you want to move it down. Let's say, for example, oh 8 picas. Now it starts that further much down. You want to also turn on Keep In Frame because if you don't the invisible rule appears 8 picas above here. So when you choose Keep In Frame that forces InDesign to put the Rule Above inside the frame, even if it's the first paragraph in the frame.

There we go. So now we have done that for that chapter, Chapter number space, and if we go through here and we look for other chapter starts we can see it applies throughout and if a some point you think, "You know what? I want a little bit more space," I can just edit the Paragraph Rule Offset to maybe say 10 picas and see what that looks like. The looks good, okay. So there are a couple ways to force text to start further down from the top edge of the frame using either the Paragraph settings or the Frame settings.