From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using the Story Editor - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Using the Story Editor

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- [Narrator] It's time for me to talk about one of my favorite features in InDesign. It's not really a flashy feature, but it's incredibly helpful to anyone who needs to write or edit text Inside InDesign, and that feature is called Story Editor. It's like having a little word processor built right in InDesign. Here, let me show you. I have my magazine file open from the exercise files folder, and I'm going to jump to the first page by clicking this little button in the lower left corner of the document window. Now I want to edit this story over here, so I'll select it with my selection tool. But instead of zooming in and trying to find the text, I'm simply going to select the frame itself. Then I'll go to the edit menu and I'll come down here and choose Edit in Story Editor. Or you could press Command Y on the Mac or Ctrl Y on Windows. When I do that, up comes a nice neutral window, just like a text editor. I'm not distracted by colors or drop caps or anything like that, just a neutral window, and I can make this as wide as I want to. I can make it wider or narrower. The text just reflows. I will tell you one thing that I really dislike about Story Editor is the default font that it ships with. Who wants to read that font? I'd rather use a font that I can read easily on screen. Fortunately, you can change that inside the Preferences Dialog box, which you can find on the Mac under the InDesign menu and on Windows, it's under the edit menu. What you want to do is come down here and choose Story Editor Display. Right now you can see that the font is set to letter Gothic. I don't like that, so I'm going to click in there and change it to something else like Georgia. I'll also change the line spacing to something bigger, like 150%, and I always want to make this a little bit larger, something that's easier to see on screen, like 16 points. Oh, and I love changing the cursor option. I like barbell. You know how sometimes it's hard to see the cursor flashing on screen? Well, barbell takes care of that. You'll see what I mean. I'll click okay and you can see the text updates, so it's easy to read. And wherever I click, you see that cursor immediately. Isn't that great? Now, as I said, the story editor does not show fonts or size or most other formatting of your text. What it does show is bold and italic. Like this text down here. It shows the italic text. It also shows the name of your paragraph styles here in the left column. Okay, check this out. Pay attention to the text on the right side here on the document page. It's a little bit hard to see 'cause it's so small, but I think you'll get the idea. I'm going to select some text Inside Story Editor and delete it. You'll see a slight pause, and then as soon as InDesign recognizes that you're done editing, it updates it on the document page behind. That way, the Story editor view and the document page view are always in sync. Okay, let's go ahead and get that text back by Pressing Command or Control Z. Now, I mentioned earlier that you can use Command Y or Control Y to open the story editor. You can also use the same shortcut to switch out of Story Editor to go back to your document page. In fact, not only does it go back to the document page, but it also selects exactly the same text. The shortcut always synchronizes your text selection. So for example, once again, I'll select a little bit of text in here, press Command or Control Y. It opens the story editor and selects exactly the same text. So Story Editor is great. Whenever you need to edit really tiny text or text on a path or maybe text that's in a frame so wide that it's hard to see all of it at the same time. But one of the best uses for Story Editor is when you have so much text that it cannot fit into the frame. For example, in this frame you can see a little overset marker. That means there's too much text to fit into this frame. I can't see all the text on the document page, but I can see it in the story editor. The story editor knows no bounds. Let me make this a little bit taller. See this text down here that has a red line next to it? That's the overset text. It doesn't fit inside the frame, but I can still edit it, copy it, paste it, or even select it and delete it. Whatever you need to do, super helpful. Ultimately, whether you're editing really tiny four point text at the bottom of a legal contract or hundreds of pages in a novel, the story editor makes life so much easier.

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