A couple of years ago, I wrote up a short article on how to rotate text inside a text frame — that is, leave the frame rectangular (or whatever shape it was) and rotate text along an angle inside it. But here’s the flip side: How can you rotate the frame but leave the text alone, on its normal horizontal arrangement?
There are two ways to do this. First, you could rotate the frame and then use that crazy pathfinder trick I wrote (see link above) to unrotate the text. That’s ugly.
The faster, easier way to do it is to choose the Direct Selection tool from the Tools panel (the white arrow tool), then Option/Alt-click on the frame. That modifier key trick selects all the points on the path, so you don’t have to shift-click on each one to select them all. Then choose the Free Transform or Rotate tool from the Tools panel and drag!
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on April 13, 2013
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wow
so fine idea.
Thank you for the great post.
I need to change the orientation of speech bubbles on different pages & have always just used a separate text box but I had hoped there was a simple, neat solution for this – love how I learn a new solution at least once a week (even this long after this was initially posted) – thank you!
Thank you! No doubt saved me hours and a ton of frustration.
Just ran across this post. This will be HUGELY handy! David Blatner is an InDesigner’s best resource!
Thanks a lot! Very helpful 4 me today.
useful
Nice tip… I’m just trying to think of a single reason why you would do that.
I have a custom shaped text box (think of a cartoon caption). The arrow points to the right. Was working on a file where I needed the arrow to point down. Could not figure out how to do this without rotating orientation of box, converting to no content, dropping another box over top and combining the 2 shapes. This works perfect to do what I need to do. Thanks!!
Simple & cool!
thanks
David Ramirez