For this program and pretty much any program, learning keyboard shortcuts makes your life
a lot easier and makes everything go faster.
I came from using other Adobe products and a little pagemaker + quark.
The number one thing for me in Indesign was understanding how frames work.
I’m sure your class will cover this stuff but if you have the chance to play with indesign early,
before the class, you might find these few simple things let you start making good-looking
documents right away.
—
Everything (text, image, whatever) is sitting in a frame.
Usually the frame is a rectangle but you can get fancy and use circles, ovals, etc.
So, combining the idea “learn keyboard shortcuts” and “learn about frames”:
If you click and drag with the text tool you draw a frame and text will stay inside that box.
If you have too much text for the box, ctrl+alt+C will make the box taller so the overflowing text will appear.
If there’s just too much to realistically show (like it flows several inches off the bottom of the page)
You can click the red [+] on the bottom right of the text box to ‘grab’ the overflow text,
and then click somewhere else (like a new page) to drop that text into a new text box. The boxes are linked
so if you delete lines in the first box, it affects the 2nd box.
If your text fits into a frame with room to spare, the same shortcut ctrl+alt+C will nicely shrink
the text box to fit the text.
You can bring in new text & graphics easily with the standard Adobe shortcut ctrl+D for “place”.
This lets you place image files of many different types… JPEGs, photoshop files, PDFs, even
some non-adobe files like Microsoft Word documents.
When you have an image it sits in a frame too. The frame is used to crop the image, there’s no separate crop
tool like you may be used to in other programs. If you want to crop the image just drag the corners
of the blue frame to hide unwanted areas of the image.
If you crop and image but want to “uncrop” it, our same miracle shortcut ctrl+alt+C will do that,
expanding the frame if it’s hiding part of the image, or shrinking it if the frame is larger than the image.
The thing that confused me when I was new was… “OK but how do I resize the image then?”
In many programs dragging the corners resizes it.
It’s easy, just get used to the keyboard shortcut “E”. Nothing else, just the letter E.
You won’t see much visual difference on the screen (watch the toolbar on the left),
but pressing “E” puts you in ‘resize mode’. Now you can shrink or grow blocks of text or images
by just clicking any corner of the frame and dragging it. Hold shift while dragging to keep things proportional.
If you want to stop resizing press V to return to the default arrow tool, which means
dragging the corner of frames will crop rather than resize.
One more shortcut… you already see ctrl+alt+C is nice for managing the size of the frame.
If you make a frame just the right size but want an image to fit nicely in that frame, ctrl+alt+shift+C.
That way instead of enlarging or shrinking the frame, it will grow or shrink the image inside
to fit the frame.
Good luck with your class ^^
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