From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Putting text on a path - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Putting text on a path

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- [Instructor] You've seen how we can put text inside a frame, but what about putting text on a path? How do we do that? For example, inside this magazine document from the Exercise Files, I'll press Option or Alt + page up a couple of times to jump to an earlier spread. Now see this path here, this red one? I'll just select it with a Selection tool and zoom in to 200% by pressing Command or Control + 2, I'll be talking about how to draw paths like this in a later chapter, but for now, let's put some text along this curve. At first you'd think that you'd use the normal Type tool to put text on a path, but I'll tell you now, it will not work. You need a different tool to tell InDesign that you want text to go on a path. It's the Type on a Path tool, but where the heck is that? Well, it's hiding underneath the Type tool. To get it, you have to click and hold for just a moment, and then you get this little pop-up menu that lets you choose either the Type tool or the Type on a Path tool. That's the trick. So we'll choose the Type on a Path tool and now move your cursor on top of the path. When you do that, you'll see a little plus sign up here. That means the type on the path is going to be added to this frame. Then if you click, it'll place the text on the path. See that flashing cursor? Now you can just start typing, but in this case, we already have the text we want down in this frame on the right side of the screen, so I'm going to click in here and I'll quadruple click to select the whole paragraph. Then I'm going to cut it to the clipboard with Command or Control + X. Now to put that text on that path, we can actually use either the Type on the Path tool or the regular Type tool. You only need the Type on a Path tool to convert the path and start putting text on the path. After that, you can just use the regular Type tool. But in this case, I'll go ahead and come over here and simply click. Now I'll paste with Command or Control + V. As you can see, the text is going along the outside of the path, so this looks good, but I don't like the position of the text. The easiest way to adjust that is to change the start and end points. Let me show you. I'm going to switch back to the Selection tool, and when I do that, you'll see these two lines show up, one at the beginning and one at the end of the path. See, you need to think about text on a path like this. It's kind of like having a text frame wrapped along the edge of the path, and those two lines are the left and right edges of the frame. And the cool part is you can move those edges simply by dragging them. For example, I'll move my cursor over the left line and then I'll just drag it over. Well, that was a bit too far. Can you see the little overset marker on the right side? That means there's more text that can fit on that path, so I'll move this back a little bit. So you have a lot of control about where the text is going to start and end on the path. Also, see these little white boxes along those edges? Those white boxes are the in port and the out port. That means I could actually thread from a text frame to text on a path. They're just like frames. Now, InDesign has a bunch of other options for text on a path, which you can find up here in the Type menu. Just choose Type on a Path and then choose Options. I'll move this out of the way, so we can see what we're doing. This dialogue box lets you format that text on a path in all kinds of really cool ways. For example, right now, the effect is set to Rainbow. That means it's going to follow the path as it curves around, but if I change the effect to something like Skew, well now it looks really different. It's kind of cool, it's almost 3D. I like that. There are a bunch of other options in here that you should experiment with. For example, you can change the spacing, but I should point out that it's kind of backward. Negative numbers spread out the text and positive numbers track it closer together. Anyway, I'm going to click OK because I want to point out that the last thing you need to know about text on a path is if you don't like the look anymore and you want to remove the text from the path, how do you do that? Well, it's easy. You just go back to the Type menu, look inside the Type in the Path sub menu, and choose Delete Type from Path. Now it's gone, it's just a regular object again. Setting text along a path is a wonderful way to create all kinds of special effects on your page. And as you can see, once you know how, it's easy to do.

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