Overset text doesn't scale with the text frame

If anyone knows of easy ways to scale entire contents of an overset text frame proportionally I'd love to hear about it. Just selecting all and resizing text would mess up the line height and such, and won't work for text that has different sizes within one frame.

Whenever I catch someone doing what you are doing - scaling the frame to reduce text size proportionally - I always advise against doing so. I don't plan to do it to you, as you're not the direct report of someone who is paying me to fix your workflow! But you're running into one of maybe 15-20 reasons I've found over the years to avoid relying on frame scaling to handle text size. You're scaling the frame, not the text, and it's a preference choice  whether or not the contents scale along with the frame (Edit -> Preferences -> General -> "When Scaling"). So it's unsurprising to me that text that currently isn't inside the frame doesn't scale when you scale the frame. The overset text, on the other side of the red + symbol, is from InDesign's view not inside the frame. 

The kind of tool I'd assume you'd want to use is one like @TᴀW 's Fit Text to Frame. I wrote my own clunky scripts to do this - I have requirements that vary from client to client, so I have one base script that increases or reduces the text size, leading, and paragraph spacing proportionally, which I modify for each client's regulatory/ADA/aesthetic/etc. requirements. It acts just like the "scale the contents of a given frame all at once" technique you use, but instead of addressing the text, it addresses the entire story.  But outside of a custom script, I can't see any way to achieve what you're trying to do, as there isn't any way to click on the entire story with the Selection tool if part of the story is overset.

Better is always to use styles. Scale the text, create and apply a new paragraph style.

You may want to try this:

• 1) Use your Black Arrow/Selection tool to scale the text frame to roughly the size you want.
• 2) Get your Text tool. 
• 3) Click anywhere in the text bock inside your text frame. If you can't see any text, just click inside the text frame with the Text tool. Then select all the text in the thread by either using the Edit>Select All menu command or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+A, for Mac and Windows systems respectively.
• 4) Size the type in either your Control Panel or Character Panel to the point where it all shows in your roughly sized text frame. Make sure you can see all the type, and the red "+" sign is not showing in the exit bubble in your text frame. Format it inside the text frame as you would like the copyfit to appear in the end result.
• 5) Go back to your Black Arrow/Selection tool. Now you can use your Cmd+Shift+Drag workflow to size both all the text and the associated text frame proportionately.

You have to select all the type and roughly scale the type size inside the frame with text formatting. That's a Text tool function. Then you can proportionately scale the text frame. They are two separate functions. As you've discovered, if you don't do the text formatting first, you won't get the results you're looking for.

Hope this helps,

Randy

Hi Trancilian,

Thank you for reaching out. We are unable to reproduce the issue on our end. Would you mind telling us the version of InDesign installed on your machine? Does that happen with all files or with a specific file? 

Meanwhile, please try running InDesign in safe mode, and also try manually resetting the preferences by following the steps in this article

Let us know if that resolves the issue. 

Thanks,

Harshika