Importing text into InDesign

- [Narrator] Unless you also have a sideline as a copy righter, it isn't the job of a designer to write the text or copy for a document. Your job is to get the text into InDesign and make it look it's best so that the message it carries can be easily read, understood, and hopefully acted upon in the way that the brief has indicated. It's pretty straightforward to get advertising and marketing copy into InDesign, as it tends to be relatively short. Although that said, it's not that much harder to get large volumes of text in either for that matter, but that's for another day.

So, here in InDesign, we're going to use the place command again, just as we did with images. But before we do, let's make it so that any new text we type or place is automatically using our body font for this document, Kinesis. The way to do that, is actually really really simple. All that needs to happen, is to have no text selected. If I now go to the type tool, and choose Kinesis from here, so there it is at the top.

That's it, that's all I need to do. Anything I start to type, now, so if I just drag a quick text frame here, and type something like "Hello" just there, you'll see, it's in Kinesis. Okay, so that's the way to do it. In fact, if you want to do it for the whole application, all you need to do is to not have any document open. And that sets the preference for the application. This sets a document level preference, so anything in this document, and that makes perfect sense, if you think about it.

So let's bring in some text then. So use the place command, you can have a frame ready to go, but I haven't, I'm going to let it draw it's own frame. So cmd + d, or ctrl + d, and in the exercise files for this lesson, I've put in this file, lila copy, just here, and what I'm going to do is make sure that Show Import Options is on, this time. You may elect not to use it beyond that, but I'll show you it at least one time. So if I hit open, this is the Import Options dialogue that I get, and it asks me what I want to include.

In fact you can even save presets from here. So I used to get customers, that did the same things every time, and added in the same content, and it took me a little while to clean it out. So I just made a preset that I could just go to their name, and it would do all of these things for me. But here, I'm just going to say, don't include table of contents, index, footnotes or end notes, do use typographer's quotes, because sometimes you get the dumb quotes, which are actually measurement markers in there, I'm going to remove the styles and formatting from any text and tables, because they might have all sorts of nonsense going on in there.

If I chose to preserve, I can actually work out how those things are mapped, and there's some work flows where you might want to do that. But here, I'm going to say remove it, because I'm not sure what sort of typists they are. And I'll just leave convert tables to unformatted tables. When I hit OK, it comes into the place cursor. Now, if I just click like so, it will draw a frame here between the columns. I'll just undo that to put it back into the cursor.

One of the things you have to be careful of, is if you're over another frame, and you click, sometimes, it can replace that content. Now, because this is an image frame, and this is text, that didn't happen, but if it would've been a text frame, it would have replaced it. I want the text to occupy these three columns, just here, so what I'm going to do is position my cursor at the top of the first column and then click and drag across like so. Okay, so here it is, and it's ready to go, so I'm just going to double click so that I can edit it, you can see it's formatted in Kinesis Pro 3 already, because we took that step earlier, and we can start to work on it.

So, headline at the top is just an indication from the marketing person that that's what the headline is, so I can just delete that, and remove that line. Body is just an indication that it's the body copy from there on, and I can delete that too. And immediately, it looks like I've got a frequent paragrapher, so somebody who's just hitting the paragraph control, one of those type crimes. There's probably some double spacing in here as well. So, what I'm going to do, is clean it. If I select all, that selects even the text that you can't see in the frame, because there is more text here, and this indicator, the little red plus at the bottom there, shows me that there's more text that can't be displayed, 'cause there's not enough frame room.

Let's do a clean up on the text, though. So, if I bring in the Fine Change dialogue by cmd + f or ctrl + f, one of the things I've got here is this query drop down. And so what I can do is choose multiple return to single return from here, and it writes it here in grep language. And I'll just do Change All, and it can tell me, there you go, five replacements have been made. So all of those additional paragraphs have gone.

And then, I've got here multiple space to single space, and again this is more grep, and this looks like loads of fun but it's just describing several different kinds of space. And I'll do Change All, yep, and there you go. There was one replacement in there as well. So that's it, all good, and done. So our copy's now in, we need to do a little bit of work on it however, and we'll pick that up in the next movie.