226 Making object styles to change frame size

- When it comes to making object styles, one of the most common InDesign questions that I hear is can you make an object style that specifies a width and height. You know, changes the size of the frame. Well, the answer is, it's complicated. There's no way to do this for graphic frames but if you're tricky you can sort of do it for text frames because text frames have certain formatting options that make it possible. Let me show you how. I have a blank document open here and I'm going to open the Object Styles panel over here in the dock.

If you don't see Object Styles in your dock, you might need to change to a different workspace. You can do that up here in the Application bar. I'm using the Advanced workspace. In the Object Styles panel I'll click in the little menu in the upper right corner. In here, I'm going to choose New Object Style. Now, there are a lot of things that you can change inside this dialog box but I'm going to focus on just a couple of them. First, I'm going to go to the Text Frame General Options pane. So I'll click that in this list on the left.

I'm going to change the Columns pop-up menu from Fixed Number to Fixed Width. I'm telling InDesign that I want this text frame to have one column and the width should be exactly 15 picas. You could use millimeters, or inches, or centimeters, whatever you want. I'm comfortable with picas, so that's what I'm using here. The next thing I'm going to do is click on Text Frame Auto Size Options over here in this list on the left and I'm going to change the Auto Sizing pop-up menu to Height Only.

Next, I'll click on this Lock to Top icon at the top of this little grid of icons. That means this frame will only grow from the top down. And, this is important, I'm going to turn on the Minimum Height check-box and I'm going to specify the minimum height to be the height I want for my text frame. In this case, 20 picas. Again, there are many other things that I could change inside this frame, for example, I could specify it's fill or the stroke of the frame. Right now it's set to have a one point black stroke and I don't want that, so I'm going to set this to None.

I could even assign a paragraph style to any text inside this frame. I'll do that by clicking on Paragraph Styles on the list on the left and then choosing a paragraph style from this pop-up menu. I'm going to choose Caption which is a paragraph style that I already created inside this document. Now, I'll go ahead and click OK and let's see if it works. Of course I need a text frame, so I'll press the T key to jump to the Type tool and then I'll simply drag out a frame. Now, I'm going to zoom in a little bit by pressing Command +, or Control + on Windows, a couple of times and I'll type Figure 1: This is cool! Something like that.

Now, I want to apply my object style so I need the Selection tool. You can't apply object styles with a Type tool. You need the Selection tool and I can get there by pressing the Escape key on my keyboard. When I do that it switches to the Selection tool which lets me apply my object style here inside the Object Styles panel. I call this Object Style 1. I probably should have given it a more descriptive name but let's try it out anyway. I'll simply click once on that and you can see it immediately worked.

It changed the width, the height and it applied the paragraph style. And check this out. If I dragged the handle at the bottom of the frame, it always snaps back to the height it's supposed to be. But now, this isn't fool-proof. As I mentioned a moment ago, this is just a minimum height. There's no maximum height and that means if I typed a bunch of text inside this frame so that it filled and then over-set the frame, the frame would actually start expanding. So, that might be a problem. Also, I can drag this frame wider.

If I drag this wider, you'll see that InDesign adds a whole other column. That's not what I wanted. I can't find any way around that besides dragging it smaller again. Drag this back down to size. So, that's why I say this kind of object style can be done, sort of. I'm hoping that Adobe will make this much easier and more fool-proof in future versions of InDesign.