From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Moving objects around - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Moving objects around

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- [Instructor] We've been putting text and graphics onto this page and it's kind of a mess, so let's go ahead and clean it up. The main tool that we're going to use to move objects around our page is the Selection tool. That's the black arrow tool at the top of the Tool panel. The Selection tool lets you move objects around your page and even resize them and rotate them. First, let's go ahead and close the Links panel by clicking on this little icon over here in the dock. Now, I'll choose this text frame in the middle of the page. As you can see, you can move this simply by dragging it, and you can change its size by dragging on any of the side or corner handles. Then if you want, you can rotate the frame by clicking just outside any of the four corners and dragging. In this case, I don't actually want that frame, so I'll delete it by pressing the delete key on my keyboard. Now, let's move this photograph. If you drag the image up here near the edge, you'll see that the whole frame actually moves. I'm going to undo that with a command or control + Z. Instead, look what happens when you drag this little icon in the middle, the one that looks like a donut. That's called the Content Grabber, and the Content Grabber actually lets you move the picture inside the frame. That's a very important thing for you to understand about InDesign. Images and frames are two separate things. We currently have the frame selected, but we can move the image inside the frame using the Content Grabber. Or if you double click anywhere inside the frame, you actually select the image inside the frame. You'll notice that the highlight changed, and also the cursor changes to a hand cursor, and that means, again, we're moving the image around, not the frame. Let's move this back. Now, I'll double click again so the frame is selected, the frame that contains the image. Let's resize this logo graphic by dragging one of its side or corner handles. But as you can see, that just changed the frame size, so it cropped out part of the logo. That's okay. We can use the frame fitting buttons here in the Properties panel to fix that. This first button is Fill frame proportionally. That almost works, but some of the logo is still cropped out. The second button is Fit content proportionally, and that's perfect. Now the logo fits inside the frame. To position this, we simply drag it around, and you'll notice these little lines flashing on and off. Those are called Smart Guides, and they're a great way to make sure that objects are aligned or distributed on the page properly. So I'll drag this over until I see this pink line, and that says it's centered on the page, or let's try moving this graphic over here. I like the look, but unfortunately some of the text is behind the image and that's not so good. I want the text to run around the logo. To do that, we want to make sure the frame is selected, not the text frame, but the graphic frame. Then I'll head up to the Window menu. All of InDesign's panels live up here in the Window menu. We want Text Wrap. Now, this panel has a lot of options, but for right now, I'm just going to click on this second button at the top of the panel. That forces the text to wrap around the rectangular graphic frame. Then, I'll close this panel by clicking the little X at the top. Now, if we move the logo, you'll see that the Text Wrap updates. Okay, this page is finally really coming together, so the next important thing to know is how to print this document or export it as a PDF.

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