« Paragraph Rules Trick | Main | Typefi AutoFit Plug-in for InDesign »
Round Corners and Text Inset
By Cari Jansen | September 1, 2007
Digitip 059 - Adobe InDesign CS3/ Typefi AutoFit
At the InDesign Conference, a gentleman in the audience asked “when I set a text inset for Text Frame, and apply different insets for Top, Left, Right and Bottom, I loose this functionality when I apply a Corner Option to the frame, it turns to Inset”.” Is there anyway around this?” The answer is “Yes, but you’d need to apply a little trick AND use the AutoFit plug-in for InDesign that Typefi Systems has just released”. The plug-in will not cost you a cent and can be downloaded from the Typefi web-site.
The issue
The issue the gentleman at the conference described indeed occurs as soon as a Corner Option is set for a text frame.
The Text Inset under Object > Text Frame Options… changes from Left, Right, Top, Bottom to Inset. In a similar manner to the change you see in Text Wrap options for Offset as soon as the object isn’t a rectangle anymore.
The AutoFit Solution
Start by drawing a rectangle and add the required Rounded Corner Option setting. (Object > Corner Options).
Next create a Text Frame that is almost the same size (just make it a tiny bit less deep). To create the second frame in the same spot you could: Copy the current frame, Edit > Paste in Place, Change the pasted frame to text frame (Object > Content > Text), then Set Object Style to Basic TextFrame (assumes you haven’t amended this setting for your document).
Click the top middle Reference Point and make the frame a bit shorter.
Launch the Typefi AutoFit panel and select the Text Frame. Set the ‘grow’-behaviour for the frame to Resize from Top. This means that when more text is added to the frame, the top of the text frame stays in the same spot and the bottom expands.
We now select the Typefi AutoFit tool from the bottom of the InDesign Toolbox and Set a Parent Child relationship between the bottom of the Text Frame and the bottom of the underlaying Rounded Corners Frame. Click the bottom of the Text Frame, then Click the bottom of the Unassigned Frame with the Rounded corner. A Relationship line appears, and the parent-child relationship is indicated by the black-white markers. Set the Baseline Gap value for the text frame to “0″
This relationship causes the bottom frame to grow when the Text Frame grows as a result of more text input.
The great thing is that you can set your text inset on all four sides as the text frame itself doesn’t have a corner option applied to it. Pretty Cool stuff.
Topics: digitip, indesign, plug-in, typefi systems |
May 17th, 2008 at 4:36 am
Thank you. I am a new user but you explained this clearly and simply.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Thank you for the nice note Sally. I’m glad to hear the tip helped you out.