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Designing the Adobe InDesign Way
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In some documents, you might only require a few lines of text—for example, with single-page flyers—but there are many other documents where you have many pages of content such as magazines, books, large reports, tender documents, and so on. In such documents, it can be really useful to thread your text frames together into a single story. This enables all the frames in the story to function as one, allowing text to flow from one frame to another seamlessly as though it were in a single frame.
In this recipe, we are going to learn how to thread text frames together, view text threads to check the order of flow, add frames to a story, remove frames from a story without losing the text, and change the flow of the story, as well as thread text using the semi-auto and auto flow modifiers.
In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages and facing pages enabled, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. Facing pages are not required for threading text frames, but they will make it easier for us to demonstrate how text threads can run across multiple pages. During this exercise, you will also need to be able to create text frames and add placeholder text, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe.
In order to work with text threading in InDesign, follow these steps:
Figure 2.38: Text frame with overset text before threading
Note
When threading text frames, be sure to just click once on the out port, then click into the new frame. I often see people try to click and drag the out port across onto the new frame, which doesn’t work.
I am using facing pages (as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1) in order to make this easier to show here, but that isn’t necessary for this to work. You could just as easily thread 2 frames together that are 20 or 30 pages apart.
Figure 2.39: Two frames threaded with Show Text Threads enabled
If you don’t immediately see the threads, one reason might be you don’t have any of the frames in the story selected. Simply switch to the Selection tool and click on one of the frames, and you should then see the threads.
If you still aren’t seeing the threads, one other reason for this could be you are working in Preview mode rather than Normal mode, in which case you should switch to Normal mode (which is what you should generally use when working), as shown in the Change the screen mode recipe in Chapter 1.
Figure 2.40: Adding a new frame at the end of a story
To insert the new frame into the middle of the story, select the frame that you would like to insert it after—in this case, the frame at the top of our left-hand page—and click the out port of that frame (marked as B in Figure 2.38). Your cursor will now change, and you should click into the new frame, which will cause InDesign to insert the frame at that point in the story, continuing the rest of the story afterward.
In Figure 2.41, I have added the bottom-left frame to the story, causing the threads to update and include the bottom-left frame in the middle of the story:
Figure 2.41: Inserting a text frame into the middle of an existing story
In order to reverse this, let’s now thread our second and third frames back together by clicking the out port in frame 2 and clicking into frame 3.
Advanced quick tip
Would you like to remove a single frame from a story and have it retain its own text, while automatically reflowing the other frames? If so, go to the Window menu, and under Utilities open the Scripts panel. In the Scripts panel, expand the Application section, then expand the Samples section, followed by the JavaScript section. Select the frame you want to separate out and now double-click the BreakFrame.jsx
extension listed in the panel. Job done.
Having done this, let’s now delete all but the first frame.
Tip
Would you like to unthread a whole story? Simply select a frame in the story and go to the Window menu, then under Utilities, open the Scripts panel. In the Scripts panel, expand the Application section, then expand the Samples section, followed by the JavaScript section. Select a frame in the story, and now double-click the SplitStory.jsx
extension listed in the panel.
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