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Inline and Anchored Objects

Lesson 10 from: Adobe InDesign CC Intermediate: Beyond the Basics

Erica Gamet

Inline and Anchored Objects

Lesson 10 from: Adobe InDesign CC Intermediate: Beyond the Basics

Erica Gamet

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Lesson Info

10. Inline and Anchored Objects

Lesson Info

Inline and Anchored Objects

I'm gonna actually go over and grab these people here. I'm gonna grab their little, teenie, tiny, short bios, I'm gonna grab those and just copy that. We're gonna bring that out to this standalone document. And I'm gonna go ahead and paste them on there as well. So now what I want to do. Instead of maintaining these images. These are a lot of images to maintain. Let say we have 30 or 40 of these, and we have their bios. And now they're gonna say, "Oh we actually want to move, "Jim goes behind over here past Helen. "We move her up. "We're gonna rearrange them. "Or we're gonna add in whole new people "that we didn't have before." So we want to be able to do that. In fact, I'm gonna move her off to the side. We're gonna add her in later. So what I want to do is, I want to create a way for the text in the images... to be kind of locked together. So what I want to do is create what's called anchored images. So I'm just gonna move these guys off to the side here. Forgive me if I forget who i...

s who, and I don't put them in the right order. I'm gonna go ahead and put these all into one text frame actually. So I'm gonna create a new text frame. And I'm gonna just copy this text here and paste it in. And hit return. And I'm gonna select all this text and paste it in. And do the same thing here. Select all, copy, and paste it in. So now I have it actually in one text frame. So I move all this sort of off the pasteboard out of the way. That's what the pasteboard is for. To throw up all your junk over there. And then I'm gonna make all of this a little bit bigger, just so we can see it. So I'm gonna go ahead and make this person, let's make this 36. And I'm gonna show you one way to copy and paste formatting before we get into styles. Here's another way we can do it. We can use the eye-dropper tool. And, if I double-click on the eye-dropper tool I can make sure that everything selected, it's gonna grab absolutely all the information that is one thing that I pick it up from and drop it into another. So I'm gonna use that. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna just click on this lettering that's here inside the letter somewhere. Oops! I am not gonna do that. I'm going to... I just want to work with the Character Settings. Let's do that. I'm gonna say No Fill, No Stroke. Just Character Settings. No Paragraph Settings. Let's try that. So I just picked this up. It is not letting me do it. Alright. I'm gonna do this a different way. I'm gonna select this text and then I'm gonna use the eyedropper tool. And I'm gonna click on the text that's here. And it automatically sizes it up. Now I have that information kind of loaded into that cursor, into the eye-dropper, and now I can select and drag across the text and it puts that same styling in there. Now we don't usually do this very often. If I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna set this up as Styles. In fact, I probably have Paragraphs Styles already set up. I can see that when I copied and pasted that in there it brought the styles from that other document. But this is a quick way to do it, and then you can add it into Styles later if you want. So I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing. I'm gonna make this guy a little bit bigger. Just make the text a little bit bigger here. And, then I'm gonna select this text and I'm gonna use the eye-dropper tool, clicking very carefully on just that letter so it changes the size. Again, it's not, it's not changing the text. It's just changing what the text looks like. I just want it to be a little bit bigger here. And then what I want to do is, I want to be able to attach these images so that they move with the text as we go along. I also want to make sure that I have a little bit of extra space in between here. So I'm just giving it some space before. We've been doing a lot of space before, so it shouldn't be new to anybody. I just want to have a little bit more breathing room for that. And, I think I may even make this document, just tall. Then again, this is something that as you're working you're gonna find that you didn't set something up right in the beginning and you need to make a change to it. Like I just did. And I realized a tall page would actually work better. The fact that I can go back to the document set-up and I don't have to start from scratch, I can just change that, saves me a lot of time. So there are a couple of different ways I can work with this text. I could go ahead and make this so that the images are sitting inside the text frame. Or they could sit outside the text frame and still travel along with the text. And that's basically what I'm trying to do. So I'm creating and in-line or an anchored object depending on which route I go with that. An in-line graphic means it sits inside the text frame. So it's actually gonna sit completely enclosed inside this text frame and will travel with it. Which is great if that's how you want it to look. But, we might want it sitting off to the side and looking completely independent. And we can do that but still create that relation between her picture and her name and his picture and his name. So let's do that. So the first thing I can do is, I'm gonna take this first photo and I was gonna go ahead and go up here to this little handle that's here. So it even tells you. It says you can drag it into the text frame if you want, or I can Shift-drag it which will make an in-line object. So, if I just drag this in it's gonna leave the picture where it is but attach it somehow to her name. But what I want is to actually sit it inside this frame. And that is an in-line object. So it even tells me that, that I have to hold down the Shift key to do that. So I'm gonna hold down the Shift key and drag from that item and I'm just gonna drop it right to the beginning of her name. So when I do that you can see it's actually sitting there as part of her name. Now it sees that basically as one character. If I use my arrow keys I can jump across characters and then it's gonna jump across her picture and you can hopefully maybe see the cursor blinking on the left side. That's because it now sees that as one image. I'm sorry, one character. I'm gonna actually hit return because I want it to sit above that. Alright so now I have that there and that is an anchored object. I'm sorry, an in-line object. So I can actually look at that. I can select the item and now that little blue dot has changed to this little anchor. So it tells me that it's anchored. I can also option or alt click on that to open the dialogue for that. And by default, it's already set as an in-line object. And I can also, If I didn't want to do that actual hard return, I could have told it above the line. In fact, let's do that. Let's delete that return that I did. That extra return. I'm gonna select the image. Optionally I'll click on the anchor and tell it above the line. And now it moves it down. And it did give a little bit of space before that. I don't like that. I'm not really sure why that moved in like that. There's no space before or after, and that would be how much space before or after, like on the text. Let's see if I give it a negative space before. Alright. So it's probably grabbing some information from here, from inside the anchored object. We'll see what's going on there in a minute. But right now I'm just gonna go ahead and move that up. I can dial this in if I want it to sit exactly correct. But now it's sitting there without that extra return which we really don't want. We want it to be working... that return does kind of show up because the picture is there. And we want it to go away if the picture goes away. So now she's sitting there. She's got her picture with her there. I can do the same thing with him. I'm gonna go ahead and just drag this in. Not option drag. I'm gonna Shift-drag it in so he ends up there. And do the same thing with this guy. I'm gonna Shift-drag into there. And I'm gonna move this and make this text frame a little bit bigger. Alright. And then I'm gonna change the options on each of those. And we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna say above the Line. And I'm gonna just move this space before up. And we had a little bit of space after. That might not be exactly the same. I don't remember what options we set on there. Above the line. And we're gonna bring the space before, after, and a little space afterwards and say Okay. So now those items are there so that if I were to add some more information to her bio. I'm just hitting return as if I was typing more information. All those images are gonna move down with it. The image and the text below travel with it. And that's what we're looking for. In fact, I'm gonna shorten this up so that we have room of this to jump around. Now, I probably wouldn't want him starting down here at the bottom. We'd have to do some manual fixing to that. We're not gonna worry about that though because I'm gonna create a separate text frame here. And... that's the rest of his bio that's here. Now I could go ahead and put a forced return here. So just hit the Enter key so that it jumps up to the next line. So that he's there at the beginning. Oops. I hit my scroll. Let's come back to this guy here. And I want to go ahead and add her in. So I might want to add her in in the middle or whatever. So I can come in here. I'll add her information and I need to... update her text. So I'm gonna copy that. And we're gonna go ahead and put her right in here. So I'm gonna go ahead and put my cursor, jump it to the next line and hit return. Just so I have space. So I'm just kind of wedging that in but the nice thing is that his picture is attached to that text. So it's attached to that first line of the text that's there. So I'm gonna go ahead and add her in. Actually, let's do hers as an in-line object, actually. I'm sorry, and anchored object. These are in-line. Let's do her as an anchored object. And I'm gonna go ahead and maybe she needs to have her picture sitting out here. But I always want it to attach to her name which is sitting in this frame here. And let's match that to the other text that we had. So we're gonna use that eye-dropper tool again. Click on that text. Do the same thing. Select this text here. It needs the eye-dropper tool to grab the text to here. And I want it to link to her picture, but her picture is actually gonna sit down here. And actually that... Yeah, let's do that. I was thinking that might make it confusing but I think we'll be alright. So what I want to do is, I want to, instead of Shift-dragging that in, so it's in the frame, I want it to sit exactly where it is, and I'm just gonna drag it to the same place so that it's still linked to the beginning of her name. And now I have this arrow to show me that that's attached to it. If I hide everything, it looks exactly the same. But the nice thing is, it will change, or can change, depending where this sits in the frame. Now if I hit return, you notice it's going up. So what is that all about? We'll have to see what the options are that we have assigned to that. Let's delete this last little thing here. So what I need to do is, I need to see how these... What options we have assigned to this anchored object here. So I'm gonna Option click on that. It's no longer in-line like it was before. Now I have this huge dialogue box that has a lot of different things to look at. So basically it's a custom item because it's not in line or above Line. By making an anchored object I've made it custom. So there's two different anchored points we need to look at. So in this case the reference point. This is the object itself. So what is it anchoring by? And in this case, it's anchoring the lower right edge of the photo to something. And we may or may not want to do that. I might actually want it to be the upper left side of the image, be anchored to something else. And in this case, I might want it to be anchored to the left side, or the left bottom side of the text frame that's here. It's not actually letting me do that. Let me just come in here and say... Say anchor to the left side of the frame. Okay. I'm sorry. So the X is relative, the x axis, which is the left and right axis, what is it anchored to? The text frame? You can have it go the page margin. Let's actually do it to the page margin. And we're gonna do it instead, the right side, the upper right side to the page margin. And I want it anchored to the right side of the page margin. But what's throwing us off is we have all these offsets. So because I had it... I had positioned it, and then anchored it, it took that information and decided how it needed to be anchored. But in this case I want to tell it to anchor the upper right portion of the image. And I want it to be anchored to the right side of the page. In fact, actually, let's do the bottom portion of the image anchors to the right side of the page. So, relative to the page margin, without any offset, so it should sit right against the right side of that page. And then I also what the X and Y axis, so the top to bottom axis, also to the page margin. And also no offset at all. So let's look what that does. So now it has it sitting, in the middle of the page always to the right side of the margin and on the right side of the image as well. And I don't like where that is. I want to set it in the bottom. So let's come back here to the reference point where it sits on the page, the lower page margin. So now we can see that the lower right portion of the image is anchored to the lower right portion based on the page margin and no offset. If we wanted to bring it in from the margin a little bit that's where we'd choose our offset, give it a negative value. Right, so we can come in here and actually offset that. So I'm gonna set this back to zero though. So hopefully that makes sense. Because we had it set first, instead of going ahead and just telling it what the values were, it automatically took whatever values it had where it was sitting. But now it anchored always to that so instead of moving with this text, like it does here. Or when the text changes. It's not gonna change because it's still sitting, it's still sitting on the lower right hand corner of that page. If I move this item to a different page, however, it will come with it. So if I copy that. I'm just copying this second text frame that's here. And I'm actually gonna delete it and create a new page. And I'm just gonna go ahead and choose Paste in Place. It's gonna put it in the same spot on that page. It brings in that image. Now she doesn't move because I've told it that as long as it's on this page, it anchors... That is a weird redraw problem. Let's try this. Sometimes when you move things around the image doesn't redraw properly. So as I move this text frame around, so long as it's on this same page, it keeps it anchored to the lower right side of that. I apologize for that redraw problem. If I were to create another page, and I have this... I'm on this page here, and I create a whole other page, and I'm gonna let it, I'm gonna bring it up side by side. I'm gonna show you this in just a minute in pages anyway. I can tell it to allow those spreads to shuffle. Turn that off, so I can actually put these side by side. That's what I wanted. Now these aren't the same as facing pages. These are non facing pages. They just happen to be sitting side by side. As soon as I move this image to this new page, her image jumps along with it because I've always told it to be in the lower right. And again, just weird redraw issues, no matter where she sit on the page. For some reason if you overlap it it goes away and comes back. So hopefully that makes sense. So I can anchor that on the page. But, again, it's anchored to this particular text. So wherever this text ends up sitting is where she'll end up sitting. So now if I were to shorten this up she goes away. But as soon as I pick up the rest of that text and place it over here, her image will travel with it. So that's an anchored object versus and in-line object. So we've got in-line here. And it travels. It has to be completely inside the text frame. And then we also have anchored objects which allows us to anchor it to someplace in our text and move along with it.

Ratings and Reviews

Marianne Stewart
 

I've been using InDesign for a decade, and decided to take this class to see what else I could learn. Wow! Erica taught me ways to do repetitive tasks easier, faster, and cleaner. She showed me many, many ways that I wasn't using InDesign to it's fullest potential (and now I am!). Her teaching style is very thorough and in-depth, but also easy to follow and understand. I highly recommend this class!

Ivan
 

Great class, but as a former professional typesetter (before InDesign, PageMaker and QuarkXpress), Erica uses the term "Justified Left" incorrectly! (sorry!) There is no such thing. Justified refers only to text that spans the width of it's column from edge to edge. The spacing in-between words will vary. Used primarily in newsprint where the columns widths are narrow. The other proper terms for text alignment are: Flush Left Ragged Right (or) Left-Aligned Flush Right Ragged Left (or) Right-Aligned Centered Justified The oddball is "Justified". It's the only option where word spacing is variable. This is the least desirable because it creates "Rivers and Valleys" of white space that distract the eye. Letter and word spacing can be tightened or tweaked to improve the overall look, but at cost in time.

Sarah
 

Great class and very informative. Erica’s a good instructor. Given the volume of information presented I’d like to see class materials included. It makes the course much easier to follow.

Student Work

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