Expert: Candice Anderson - 7/24/2006

Question

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Followup To

Question -
I am teaching myself Indesign since we just bought a MAC for the first time and I have loved working with graphics in other programs. I just finished a turorial, but must have missed something. To create logos, or monograms how can you manipulate the text? How can you make them overlap or manuver them? When typing the text and converting it to a graphic for shadow purposes it becomes an in-line graphic and you cannot much move it anywhere. What am I missing?

Answer -
I'm not sure how you are coming to this problem. The greatness of Indesign is that you can create shadows and are able to move them around.  Hmmm...try selecting the box, not the text and then put a shadow around it.  

As for manipulating, Indesign is not really intended to do that.  You can make the text transparent, add shadows and feather (all located in the object tab), thats just about it.  

When you say overlap them, do you mean put text on top of each other? That shouldn't be a problem, as all you would need to do is put the text on top of each other.  If you need to put a text on top of one, just go to object, arrange, put the object up front. (feel free to yell if totally misunderstood :) )

Candice ;)

Thank you for your quick response! I guess then my question would be - are you keeping the text in a text box or changing it to a graphic? Let's say if you want to make a monogran you place each initial in it's own text box and then you can arrange them accordingly. If you create a shadow it will do it on the letter or just on the box? My impression from this tutorial was that in order to get a shadow on a letter you had to change it to a graphic. If you did want to manipulate text artistically - what program would you use? Thank you.

Answer
Text is a vector image when created in Indesign.  Again, you really can't do much with it.  To create a graphic that can have filters and what not, use photoshop. However, if you are not planning to do much to the letters, if you're just adding a shadow, then indesign is fine. If you only want to do it to one letter, create a text box for each letter.  When you create a shadow, you are creating that shadow for the text box.  So if ABCDEF are in one text box, you can create a shadow for all of them, but not one.  


Candice :)