From the course: InDesign Secrets

342 Numbering items in a diagram - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

342 Numbering items in a diagram

- [Instructor] I have a technical diagram here and I want to place some numbers on top of it, and then over here on the left I want to have a list of all the labels. Now of course, I could do that simply by making a bunch of text frames over here with numbers in them and then I'll make another text frame over here and type my legend into it, that is the list of all the labels. And you know, that's fine if you know that this diagram will never get updated. But if your document is in flux and you never know when your client or your boss is going to say oh, can you just make a new item here and just update all the numbering, I hate that kind of thing so I'm always on the look out for clever ways to build files that can be changed really quickly. So here is an awesome way to make dynamic figure legends that a guy named Stefano Bernadi came up with. And he published it on our blog at InDesign Secrets. Now, you can see that this diagram is simply a graphic and I've also placed three text frames on top of it. And these frames are threaded together into a single story. I've already typed the first label into the first text frame. To add more, I'm going to double click on this with a selection tool and that switches to the type tool automatically. Now I'll press enter or return and type the second one which is going to be cockpit. You'll see that when I type that it automatically gets a number placed before it, that's because I've already created and applied a paragraph style that has automatic numbering. Let's go ahead and do the third one, I'll hit enter or return and then type propeller. Now it's important that you place the number exactly where you want it. So I'm going to grab my selection tool and move this text frame over until it's right next to the cockpit. Now I want the number but I don't want the label to be visible, right? So I'm going to get rid of it, and to do that I'm going to change the paragraph style definition. I'll come over here to the paragraph styles panel, I'll open that up and I'm going to edit the diagram items. That's the paragraph style that's applied to those labels. To edit that, I'll right click or control click with a one button mouse and choose edit diagram items. To make that label disappear I'm going to open the character color pane inside this dialog box and I'm going to set the color to none. That literally makes it disappear, look I'll turn on the preview check box down here and I'll move this giant dialog box out of the way and you can see that all my labels have disappeared. But I do want the numbers to be visible, right? So I can do that by coming over here to the bullets and numbering pane. Let's move this dialog box back over and I'm going to add a character style to the numbers. Now I don't have a character style made yet so I'll just choose new character style, and I'll call this numbers. In this case, I'm going to apply a new character color which is black, that is the black will supercede or override the none color so I'll be able to see the numbers. When I click okay, you can see it. The numbers are there but the labels are missing. Remember the labels are still there, they're just colored none so we can't see them. Now finally, to make my legend over here I'm going to head up to the layout menu and I'm going to choose table of contents. Now I want to collect all the paragraphs that have the diagram items paragraph style applied to them. So I'll add that to my table of contents. And while this is a table of contents, I don't really want page numbers to appear next to those so I'm going to come over here and click more options, and then over here in the page number pop up menu I'll choose no page number. The entry style is the paragraph style that we want InDesign to apply to the labels. In this case, I already have one created called legend. Down here in options I'll turn this check box off because we don't need bookmarks. And I want to make sure that numbered paragraphs are set to include full paragraph, that way I get the number and the label. Finally up here in the title, I'll change this to something else like legend. And I'll apply a different paragraph style, for example the legend title paragraph style that I've already created. Alright, we're ready to go. I'll click okay and InDesign creates my table of contents or in this case, my legend, and it loads my place cursor. I could click this in an empty frame but in this case I'm simply going to drag out a new frame. And when I let go of the mouse button you'll see the legend appears in it. So there we go, but now when somebody says insert a new item into the diagram, here's what you need to do. I want to add a new item over here next to this wheel. To do that, I'm going to first select the first label and I'm going to click on its out port, that's the square on the right that has the little blue triangle in it. That loads my place cursor and I'm going to drag out a new text frame over here. This way I've added a frame that's automatically threaded into the story. But here's the problem, the text is invisible right? So it's hard to edit. I can get around that by pressing command Y on the Mac or control Y on Windows, that opens up the story editor. See up here, so I can come in here and simply type a return and then type the label that I want in this case, wheels. You can see the labels over on the right side and the numbers on the left side. Now I'll close the story editor, click inside my table of contents over here, go back to my layout menu and choose update table of contents. It tells me that it was updated successfully so I'll click okay, and there we go. The second label was added and all the other numbers updated it's as easy as that. Now sure, making diagrams like this does take a bit more time and attention, but when it comes time to update the diagram at the very last minute well, this kind of construction can really help you save time and reduce mistakes.

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