I love the Notes feature (in CS3, or in CS2 if you install the free InCopy Notes plugins), but its notes are all hidden inside text frames. I want notes that shout out, “Look at me!” Fortunately, you can make your own notes in your InDesign documents with this quick recipe:
- Create any object, such as a text frame. I like to give text frames a 20% Yellow fill with a drop shadow so that they look like sticky Post-It notes on my document. But you can make red-framed ovals, or whatever else you want.
- In the Text Wrap palette, set the wrap to None
- In the Attributes palette, turn on the Nonprinting checkbox
- If it’s a text frame, open Text Frame Options (Command/Ctrl-B) and turn on Ignore Text Wrap.
That’s it — this object won’t print, it won’t cause text reflow on the page, and it jumps out and grabs your co-workers’ attention. Best of all, you can quickly hide all the notes by pressing W to jump into Preview mode. (Nonprinting objects don’t appear in Preview mode.)
Of course, you don’t want to go through all these steps each time you need a note. Instead, once you’ve made one of these, you should save it as a snippet or put it in a library so that you can easily repurpose it later.
Another way to handle notes like this is to add them to a non-printing layer. You can make a layer that is visible but which won’t print by double-clicking on the layer and turning off the Print Layer checkbox. Then you can make the layer visible or hidden in the Layers palette. In CS3, you can override the Print Layer checkbox in the Print dialog box, printing all layers (even invisible or nonprinting layers) if you want.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on August 1, 2007
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
