InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 14. Flowing Text through a Document

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating text frames on master pages

• Linking frames and flowing text through them

• Breaking and rerouting text flow

• Specifying and adjusting columns

• Managing text-frame spacing and alignment

• Creating forced breaks

• Working with overset text

It doesn't take much experience with InDesign to discover that all your text doesn't fit into the finite space individual frames provide. Consider these scenarios:

• If you're laying out a newsletter, you might receive an article in the form of a Microsoft Word document that you need to flow into several columns across a spread.

• A magazine might have an article that starts on page 20 and then continues on page 198, with the text originating in Apple iWork Pages and saved as Rich Text Format (RTF) for import into InDesign.

• With catalogs, you might have a continuous file exported from a database that contains different product descriptions that are positioned below the items' pictures.

• In book publishing, each chapter may be imported as a separate word processing file and flowed continuously through many pages.

• The text of a simple advertisement, delivered by a client via e-mail, might flow through several text frames.

In all these cases, the benefits of frames — the ability to size, resize, reshape, and place them with precision — seem limiting. When the text doesn't fit in a frame, what are you supposed to do? Well, don't resort to cutting and pasting text into different frames. You need to keep the imported ...