InDesign Text Frames, Image Frames, Frames to hang on the wall… ops, well… InDesign doesn’t offer that one yet

Find out the difference amongst the different types of InDesign frames, how they relate to graphics and what you can and cannot do with them in this tutorial.

The Rectangle Frame Tool and Co.

By default InDesign will show the Rectangle Frame Tool in its Tools palette. This tool has a flyout with an Elipse Frame Tool and a Polygon Frame Tool. They all work the same way, but they just draw different shapes. Don’t confuse these tools with the Rectangle Tool, the Elipse Tool and the Polygon Tool, which in the Tools Palette are just next to them. The Frame Tools are intended to be used as containing boxes (or frames) for graphics, while the Rectangle, Elipse and Polygon tools are intended to just draw shapes which can then be filled with colour.

In an earlier tutorial I have explained how to place an image inside one of those frames. Let’s refresh our memory. First draw a frame. You can do this in several ways. The first one is by selecting the Rectangle Frame Tool and then by drag your mouse the same way you would do with a Rectangle Tool. As I have explained in an earlier lesson, if you press Shift while you draw a frame, all of its sides will be of the same size. This is also valid for the Polygon Frame Tool and the Elipse Frame Tool (with the Elipse Frame Tool you will have a circle instead of an elipse). Another way to “draw” a frame is simply by selecting a Frame tool and then click anywhere in your document. A window called Rectangle will appear and you will then need to enter the width and height of your frame. Press OK and your frame will appear where you first clicked on your document.

To place an image inside a frame go to File > Place, choose an image in your hard drive and press OK. That’s it! Well, almost. You now need to make sure your image fits in your frame, or viceversa. I will cover that shortly.

Another way to place graphics into InDesign is simply to go to File > Place (don’t draw any frames) and choose your picture in your hard drive, then press Ok. When you return to your page, you will see that the icon of your mouse cursor has changed and it now has a paint brush next to a little black arrow. Click anywhere on your page and the picture will be automatically placed into a frame. However you have no control over how big your frame will be as it will be as big as your picture.

Resizing Graphics in InDesign.

[1] (Enlarged version)

Look at this image. The image is bigger than the frame, factually you can only see part of it. If you click on that image with the Selection Tool you will see a blue bounding box which is the bounding box of the image’s Rectangular frame. If you click on the same image with the Direct Selection Tool, instead of selecting the frame that contains the picture, you have are selecting the picture inside the frame and you will see an orange bounding box, which is the bounding box of the image itself.

You can either change the size of the picture frame by dragging the blue handles of its bounding box with the selection Tool or you can change the size of the picture itself, by dragging the orange handles of the picture with the Direct Selection Tool. If you want to keep the proportions, hold down shift as you do any of the above.

Another way to change the size of graphics is by entering different values in the Control Palette. Depending on what you selected, when you change a value in the control palette, you will either change the size of the image frame of your graphics or you will change the size of the graphics within the image frame. I have explained how the Control Palette works in the first lesson.

A third option is to right click (Windows) or Control + click (Mac) on the picture and you will get a context menu. Got to Fitting and choose one of the options that you are given: whichever you need.

Note: You can convert an image frame tool into a text frame by clicking inside it with the Type tool. You can only do this if you did not place any image into the image frame already. If your image frame is empty, but you have applied colour to it, you can still convert it to a text frame.

The Rectangle Tools and Co.

Now let’s take a look at the Rectangle, Polygon and Elipse Tool. As I have explained earlier, these are just intended to be shapes to be used in their own right. You draw them them the same way you draw frames. So that’s all there is to it.

With InDesign, you can convert those shapes into either image frames or text frames. How do you do that? For graphics, you just do the same thing you would do with an image frame. You take your Rectangle, or Polygon or Elipse, tool, draw a shape and then go to File > Place (the InDesign native shortcut for this is Control + P for Windows or Command + P for Mac, while if you are using the QuarkXPress shortcuts, you need to replace P with E) and place your graphics inside it.

You can also convert your shape into a text frame, you just click inside it with the Type Tool the same way you can convert an image frame. So what’s the point of having these shapes tools? Well, there is no real point, a part from the fact of having one more way to do the same thing.

In the next tutorials you will learn other ways of rotating, scaling and transforming your graphics and how to use the Zoom tool, the Eyedropper, the Scissors and the Gradient Tool.

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