Placing Text om Multiple Pages

[m5heath]

Let's say I have a new document in Indesign CS5. Next step, I want to place a lot of text into the document. I go through the usual steps, File-Place etc and I end up with a loaded cursor. I go to page 1 and draw out a frame which is immediately filled with text and the out port indicates overset text. So far so good, but if instead I hold down the Shift key and do the same thing, I still only get one page instead of creating enough new pages to take all my text.

What am I doing wrong?

[Scott Falkner]

m5heath wrote:

What am I doing wrong?

Dragging.

Set the page margins on the Master Page or in New Document Setup to where you want the text to flow. Shift-Click to place the text on page 1 and it will flow into a frame that matches the Master Page margins and column guides. New pages will be aded and text will flow into those pages until all text is placed. When you drag, you break the autoflow because you are defining a single manual frame to flow the text into.

[Guest]

Hi. I am a 74 year old retired engineer, just starting to learn Indesign. I cannot seem to get even started. I want to import a .doc file in to a book format. This involves copying the whole file into multiple pages.   I am using css5 and I cannot find any "file-place" command anywhere.  Could you help?

Thanks

Dick Roose

[Scott Falkner]

Hoo boy. Menu bar at top of the screen. Click on File, then click on Place.

Buy a copy of Sandee Cohen’s Visual Quickstart Guide.

[m5heath]

Thank you so much Scott - that fixed it!

It's a well-kept secret that you have to use the page margins for that rather than a text frame. I wonder why InDesign won't let you use a master text frame? Is it a bug?

I now have another issue which is that the text, after placement, has some strange horizontal lines in random places. I'm using an rtf source file generated by Word 2010 so I'm guessing that some rogue Word formatting has somehow come across. Is that something you've ever seen or could guess a reason for?

[Peter Spier]

You can use a master text frame if you like, but there's practically never a good reason to do so. When you use a master frame you should not override it -- just click the loaded cursor inside it and it will override automatically. You'll know you are using the frame when the cursor changes to be surrounded by parentheses. If you override the frame before placing the text, you disconnect it from the mater text frame thread and any additional or new pages used or added by autoflow will use a new frame drawn to fit the margin or column guides and any master frames on those pages will still be there waiting to trip you up.

[m5heath]

"You'll know you are using the frame when the cursor changes to be surrounded by parentheses"

I found this did not work if you have the Shift key pressed, in which case the parentheses did not appear and on clicking InDesign went ahead and created a frame where the width matched the margin and the height was that of the cursor. Not very useful.

[Peter Spier]

The shift key has nothing to do with it. Guides, however, do. If you click on a guide instead of in the empty area inside the frame you'll draw a new frame snapped to the guide and the master frame will be ignored. Move your cursor into the vast wasteland in the middel of the frame area and watch the cursor. Press the shift Key and you'll see it change to the curvey arrow, but it will remain in parentheses.

[NTC Ann]

I too have wondered about an easier better way to do this for a very long time. When I choose my margins and then shift/click to add text, sure it flows into the pages...

BUT... the pages are locked as the text has been placed on the master page so for a long time I have gone thru the process of going to my document and then clicking on the + sign and going to the next page and placing it and doing this page by page.

Isn't there some way that if you do place the text into a master page like suggested, that it won't be locked into place in the actual pages? Thank you.

[NTC Ann]

Well, I got it to flow naturally inside the document on the pages... BUT... it stopped at page 5 and did not continue to page 6, etc. Now what do I need to do please? Thank you.

[Peter Spier]

Ann,

You've confused me here. Are ytou flowing text into the master pages (you don't want to do that), or into the master frames on the document pages? You can use any frame for placing, as long as it's empty. If you don't override the frame first, autoflowing text will continue to use master frames on succeding pages. If you do override first, master frames will be ignored and new frames will be created on following pages. Placing content into a master frame onthe document pages automatically overrides it after the content is placed.

So what do you mean it gets to page 5 and stops? Is there overset text? Is there a page 6 to flow into? Does it use the same master page? Are you holding down the shift key when you click, or something else?

[NTC Ann]

Hi Peter. OK. 1st I tried flowing the text into the master page and yes, it flowed to all the 20 existing pages and yes, it flows to all pages but then they are locked on the actual pages.

So next, I tried flowing the placed text into the pages themselves while holding down the shift key and not making a text box. Yes, it flowed the pages but stopped at the end of page 5 and did not go further.

There is no overset text. Same master page set up is used (master pages come up as a right and a left and yes, the text flows to page 5 and stops.) I don't know what override means and don't know how to do that. 20 pages were set up in the beginning so they are there. Yes, shift key was held down on the first page to flow it into and it went fine for the lst 5 pages but then did not flow into the existing 6th page. Thanks again.

[NTC Ann]

PS. Holding down the shift key and then flowing the placed text into the margins (not text box created)... flowed the text into the lst 5 of 20 pages and then stopped with the little red box with the x in it at the bottom. From then on from page 6, 7, etc. on... I had to manually click on the red + sign and go to the top of the next page and click to flow the text into that page and every page after. Thanks again.

[NTC Ann]

OK. Next part of the problem. I typed up my initial text to start editing it and wanted to flow it into a new document. So I set up a new document and did a Command/D (since copy paste wasn't working) and did a Shift/Click to try and place it and flow it into the pages using the margins and no actual text boxes in hopes that it would flow in. Nope. Instead all I got was an empty text box created with nothing in it and the box wider than the document itself. So problem #2 = does this process only work with text created in Word and not other text created in InDesign itself? Thanks again Peter.

[Peter Spier]

Second part first. If you want to import text from one ID file to another, you need to export it from the original file in some sort of text format, plain text, RTF or InDesign Tagged Text. Put the cursor in the story, then File > Export... and make a choice (tagged text will preserve all the formatting). Then place that the same as you would a file from Word. You can place a page or pages from one ID file into another, but youa re really placing a link tot he original page, like palcing a PDF or an image, and you get the whole page as essentially an image, and it cannot be edited directly in the receiving file.

Back to the page five problem.... If you put the cursor at the end of page 5 and highlight the last word, the press Cmd (Ctrl) + Y you'll open the story editor (you can do it from the edit menu, too). Do you see overset text? There would be a red line at the point where the overset starts. Hopefully the story editor opened to the highlighted word, but if not it should be easy to find (that's why you highlighted it). If the following text is NOT showing as overset in the story editor, we need to find it, so put the cursor somewhere nearby in the following text and close the story editor, then type a few Xs. ID should jump the view to show you where you are in the layout.

Let me know what you see either way...

[NTC Ann]

HI. No overset text but I will try these suggestions. Thanks!

[m5heath]

It still doesn't work. Here's my sequence of activity:

I go to another InDesign document and select and copy some text. Doesn't matter what.

Then I go to a new document, go to the master page and, using the rectangle frame tool, I draw out a frame well within the page border. I then go to Page 1 and I can see the new frame as a faint dotted blue outline. It will now of course appear on every page.

I press Ctrl-V to paste and a small text frame appears in the center of the document, full of text and showing overset text. With the Selection tool active I then Ctrl-click on the out port which loads the cursor with text. The small text frame is selected by default so I press Delete to get rid of it.

I now have the loaded cursor with a right-angle top left and and I'm on Page 1. If I now press the Shift key outside the page, the cursor changes so that the right-angle is still there but the up and down curvey arrow is now showing. Now I move the cursor over the page, still with the Shift key pressed.

The cursor does not change, even when I am inside the blue dotted frame that indicates where the master frame is, even when I'm dead center. I am expecting to see the parentheses but they do not appear.

I can't see what I'm doing differently from what you advise.

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

m5heath wrote:

Then I go to a new document, go to the master page and, using the rectangle frame tool, I draw out a frame well within the page border.

OK, there's where the problem is. While you can place text into any frame, you are trying to place it into a frame that on the master page is expecting an image or is unaasigned, depening on which of the rectangle tools you used. If you were working on the master page, or if this was a frame on the document page, ID would happily convert it to a text frame without furhter intervention, but apparently not for a master frame that has not been overridden.

Instead of using rectangle or rectangle frame tool, use the text tool to draw a text frame on the master page and it will work just fine.

[m5heath]

You're just an old genius Peter!

Thanks a million - it works.

Mike

[Peter Spier]

well, old, anyway.

[Guest]

"I wonder why InDesign won't let you use a master text frame? Is it a bug?"

There's nothing stopping you from using master text frames. The procedure is the same whether you use them or not, but if you do use text frames, obviously you have to click inside the frame.

"I'm guessing that some rogue Word formatting"

Very likely. And very likely that formatting will come in with either a paragraph or character style. Look to fix it there.

Message was edited by: M Blackburn Didn't notice that Peter already responded. Should be able to delete a comment as well as edit.

[Peter Spier]

M Blackburn wrote:

"I wonder why InDesign won't let you use a master text frame? Is it a bug?"

There's nothing stopping you from using master text frames. The procedure is the same whether you use them or not, but if you do use text frames, obviously you have to click inside the frame.

In this case, the problem turned out to be that the frames he/she was trying to use on the master page were not already text frames, but were drawn with one of the other frame tools. I'll freely admit this never occurred to me as being a potential problem until I saw the step-by-step description of what was happening.

[m5heath]

Many thanks for the response.

As Peter Spier helpfully pointed out, although you can use the rectangular frame tool to create a frame that you can use as a text frame (I've seen online suggestions that there is no difference between the two and I've got into the habit of doing that), you can't do so in this instance. It has to be a proper text frame. Don't know why InDesign engineers arranged it like that but sure enough, when I went through the same process using a text frame drawn out with the text cursor, it all worked the way it's supposed to.