Find out how to flow text into two or more text frames.

Text appears in two ways in InDesign: either inside text frames or along a path. A text frame is simply made by clicking on InDesign’s type tool and then draw a rectangle, i.e., a text frame. Now you just need to type your text inside it.

“But what if I want text to go from 1 frame to the other?”. Ok, ok! Let me get to it! Jeez, you guys are so impatient. Let’s have a look at this text frame in the illustration below.

Have a look at the two items that I have circled in red. The one on the top left is called the in port, while the one on the bottom right is called the out port. Before you start thinking that I am going to come up with some other term out of the Star Trek saga, let me explain what they do.

First of all draw another text frame. Now take some text from somewhere and copy it in the first text frame. Make sure you copy quite a lot of text, so that it doesn’t all fit in one frame. The out port should become red and have a red + sign inside it to indicate that there is text that is not shown. Now with your Selection tool click on the out port of your full text frame. Once you do that your mouse cursor will change to the loaded text icon. When you then move your mouse over an empty text frame it will change again to an arrow with a chain to indicate that it is ready to connect your text frame to another one. Now click on the in port of the empty text frame. The hidden text should now flow in that frame (to say the truth it does not matter whether you click on the in port or inside the empty frame itself).

What you have just done is called “threading text”. You will see that the out port icon of your first text frame has changed again to a blue square containing a little triangle pointing towards left (it looks like the play button of CD players). That means that your text frame is now threaded (connected) to another frame.

If you want to unthread text frames just double click on an in port or an out port of an already threaded frame.

Automatic and Not-Really-Automatic Threading

“And - and, what if I want to thread text frames through the document? Do I have to connect each frame one by one?” I can see you sweating and thinking at your nice 400 pages manual and how you are going to spend the night threading each box individually. Well, good for us, the answer is no, you don’t have to thread each text frame manually as there is a way to thread several text frames at once.

InDesign allows you to flow text (make text go from one frame to another) either semi-automatically or automatically. The semi-automatic method is perfect if you still want to stay up most of the night when threading your 400 pages document…

The Not-Really-Automatic method

Jokes aside, this how you semi-automatically flow text. Once you have clicked on the out port of the first text frame, press Alt + Click (Windows) or Option + Click (Mac Os) on the next frame you want to thread. The loaded text icon will automatically reload itself so you can keep threading other frames (as long as you press Alt or Option while you click) until you have text left. The difference with the manual way of threading frames is that, if you need to thread several frames, you need to manually reload the loaded text icon by clicking on the out port of each text frame you thread.

The Automatic Method

This is what will allow you to design more and sleep as well. With semi-automatic threading, you needed to either press the Alt or the Option key once you loaded the text. For automatic threading you need to hold down Shift.

If you have set up a text frame in your master, you simply click on it with your loaded text icon (while pressing Shift) and the text will flow into all of the other frames in the document until there is any text.

If you didn’t set up any text frames and you just want your text to flow along your pages, you just load your text and then Shift + click onto another page. The text will begin flowing from the point you clicked. Note that if you have set up your pages with multiple columns, and you click in one of those columns, InDesign will automatically create text frames which are as large as your columns and it will flow the text in all of your columns.