#Add border to text frame in indesign how to#

You can see that InDesign treats these outlines as a graphic frame and it fills it with the image, which gives these letters a kind of interesting texture. I'm going to grab one of these images just by random and then click the Open button. For example, let's go back and choose the Selection tool then head up to the File menu and choose Place. So that's interesting, but really one of the best reasons to convert text to outlines is to put something inside those outlines. You could also use the Pen tool to add points or move points and edit this in all kinds of ways. You can see you can make some really strange effects. I'm going to deselect this by pressing Command + Shift + A or Control + Shift + A, and then with the Direct Selection tool, let's drag some of these points around.

For example, sometimes you might want to change the shape of some text. Now people have different reasons for converting text to outlines. I'll switch over to the Direct Selection tool, and you can see all the Bezier points on those paths. That's because all the text in the frame has been converted to outlines. Because we have the whole frame selected, when we go to the Type menu and chose Create Outlines, the spacing won't change. Now, let's select the entire frame with the Selection tool. I'm going to undo this by pressing Command + Z or Control + Z a few times. Okay, let's see the other way of converting text to outlines. The outline text acts kind of like its own object inside this text frame so that you could apply an effect to it without affecting the rest of the text in the frame. That puts a big, clunky drop shadow just on that one character. To do that, you could head up to the Control panel and say, click on the little drop shadow button. For example, let's say you want to apply a particular transparency effect only to that letter. Now it's relatively rare that you'd want to convert a single letter or even a single word into outlines within a text frame, but there are times that you'd want to do it. I'll be talking about anchored objects in a later chapter. See all the little Bezier points on there? You can also see a little anchor icon attached to it, which means that this object is anchored inside the frame. Now we can see that this is actually an outline by selecting the Direct Selection tool in the tool panel and then clicking once on that character.

#Add border to text frame in indesign how to#

But now that this letter has been converted to outlines, InDesign doesn't know how to space it properly because it's not real text anymore. It was adjusting the space between the characters based on information in the font. That's because back when this R was actual text, InDesign could kern it properly with the other letters. See how it changed a little bit? The space between the R and the letters around it got smaller. But when I select it, watch the spacing around that letter R. Now let's head to the Type menu and choose Create Outlines. I'll double-click on this text frame to switch to the Type tool, and then I'll select this letter R. First, let's convert just a single letter to an outline. Here, let's go ahead and select this text from the exercise file, and I'm going to zoom in to 200% by pressing Command or Control + 2.

In fact, there are two ways to convert text to outlines, converting a whole frame or converting just some selected text. Now InDesign lets you convert any text from any font into an editable path. Fortunately, we all have a huge library of cool shapes that somebody else drew for us. In an earlier movie, I mentioned that I can't draw very well.