March 3 2007 • 11:49 AM
What I learned at the Creative Suite Conference
I’m down in Miami Beach at the Creative Suite Conference. And wow, Kacey Crouch blew me away with her tip at the final session.
Her tip has to do with getting text to position centered vertically in a text frame that has rounded corners or any other corner effect applied.
Simply apply an inset to the text frame to force the text to the vertical justification.
This gives the frame a rectangle into which the text can be centered or otherwise position.
Great tip, Kacey!
Thats a great tip! I have been bothered by that for awhile. Too bad you still can’t center vertically in a circle though. I do remember that the FormsX Extension for quark could vertically center text in a circle no problem. Come on Indesign, fix it in CS3.
Thanks, Sandee, for passing that tip on. Sandee also delivered several dozen great tips of her own at the CS conference. Next stop: The Pixel Conference and The Vector Conference in Chicago. Then we’ll both be at The InDesign Conference in New York City, June 4-7.
On Christmas Day last year, I posted a present to the community that included a script that will center vertically in an elliptical frame. Read about it here:
http://adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?128@@.3bc2a9f9
Or just download the script directly from here:
http://pdsassoc.com/BetaScripts/PseudoVJ-centered.jsx.zip
On Boxing Day, I added this:
http://pdsassoc.com/BetaScripts/PseudoVJ-bottom.jsx.zip
Dave
Thanks Dave. That script is amazing, I can’t belive Indesign doesn’t have that function built in.
You Rock!
It seems that it is not easy to implement for calculation reason and performance issue. Otherwise Quark and Adobe would have included it in their layout applications a long time ago in our galaxy…
Bran is right. My solution is static. Change the size of the frame and you have to run the script again.
And, I suspect that with certain kinds of text wraps, my scripts might even fail, but I also reckon that the combination of those particular text wraps and the purposes of my scripts are sufficiently at odds with each other that it doesn’t matter.
Dave
May I also suggest a nice tip for other shapes of text box, especially elipses.
Give the box a custom baseline grid, make the grid relative to the top of the frame with a 1pt increment and start the grid where ever works best for that shaped box.
This allows for a greater text area with in the text box.
Oh yes you need to set the text to snap to baseline grid.
These can all be set as styles or saved as snippets for repeated use.
Tim