Placing the text and looking at flow options

It's time to place our text. And I'm on page one of our document. So if you are anywhere other than page one, make sure you go there now. As I mentioned in an earlier movie, I set this document up with a primary text frame. Now if you have InDesign CS4 or 5 you did not have the option of choosing Primary text frame. You had what was called a Master text frame, but that behaved somewhat differently. So I'm going to also show you how we can do an auto flow place that does not use a primary text frame. Either way we're going to end up with all of our text on as many pages as we need to accommodate that text.

Of course that page count is going to change, but we want to see all of our text to begin with. So first of all, working with the primary text frame, I'm going to press Cmd, or Ctrl+D, and then come to my text file, Alice text. Now I have my Show Import Options turned off. I've already familiarized myself with this text, so there are going to be no big surprises. But we'll see In a later movie how you might, in certain circumstances, want to have Show Import Options turn on.

Now, if I see this missing fonts message, I don't really care, because all of the fonts I've got in this text file are going to change. All we're concerned with is getting the text in here to begin with. There's my loaded type cursor. When I move that over my primary text frame, the shape of that cursor changes. I can now just click, and after a brief pause, if I look on my pages panel, we see that I now have, in this case, 87 pages. You may have a slightly different number because maybe you didn't have a missing font, maybe you had a different default font.

It doesn't matter at this point, just so long as it's all in there. Okay, now I'm going to undo that, press Cms+Z twice. And then I'm going to delete that primary text frame. So, let's see what would happen if we didn't have a primary text frame. If I click I get just one text frame and then it stops. And I have over set text. So what I need to do to flow all of my text is hold down the Shift key while I click.

And I need to come to the top margin as well. You can see how my cursor changes its appearance ever so slightly. There's a black arrow in that cursor and then when I, and overall when I am snapping to my top margin, it turns white. At that point, I'm going to hold down my Shift key and click and I arrive at the same place that I was at before with 87 pages. Regardless of which approach you are using, I suggest you turn on this preference.

Preferences, type, and for Windows users your preferences will be at the bottom of the Edit menu. Smart Text Reflow, now in the first instance, Limit to Primary Text Frames. So in that case, it's already on. But in the second instance, Smart Text Reflow would not have any effect. All I'm going to do is uncheck Limits to Primary Text Frames so that Smart Text Reflow is applicable whether or not we are using a Primary Text Frame. That's going to mean that as our text expands or contracts, extra pages will be Added or Deleted. And I just need to do one more thing to make sure that last thing is true. Delete Empty Pages.

So, I've unchecked that, and I've checked that. And we now have all of our text flowed into our document, and we're ready to move on to the next step.