When In and Out Ports Get in the Way
Sometimes it’s the little tips that can relieve the biggest frustrations. For example, it always made me crazy that I couldn’t drag the left or right edge handle of a very short text frame to make it wider because the dang “in port” and “out port” gets in the way. After all, if you click on one of those, you load the Place cursor, right?
Grrr. Then someone mumbled to me that the solution was (get ready for an extraordinary revelation) you have to actually click-and-drag the in or out port. As long as you drag, instead of just clicking, on the port, it acts like a handle. It was literally so obvious that I didn’t see it. Sigh.
Sadly, what you can not do is double-click on the port to “fit width to text” (as you can do with a true side handle). To do that, you’d need to drag the frame wide enough, then double-click on the lower-right corner handle.
This tip was the biggest christmas gift! Thank’s so much for that! I sometimes went crazy about that!!!!
Thanks for the great tip David. And made even better by the use of a super long word. Of course the longest English word is Anti-DIS-establishmentarianism (no hyphens), although I think by now some marketing person somewhere has made up an even bigger one!
The first “tip” also doesn’t work if the text frame is really, really small, because you can’t click and drag the out port. As soon as you start dragging, it turns into the bottom right handle.
In this case, zooming in is the only solution.
“…what you can not do is double-click on the port to ‘fit width to text’…”
See, to me, THAT was the tip that was so obvious I didn’t see it. Haha, thanks!
Sorry its 8am, that may not have been clear…what I meant was I never realized you could double click to fit width to text. There we go!
Hey, I didn’t even realise that you could double-click on the port to “fit width to text”!!! Thanks for your great tips, David.
Great tip David. It’s usually one of the first things I teach new users about, only because of how much frustration this causes. The classic issue with new users is that their page is filled with millions of text frames and links are impossible to manage because they keep getting the loaded text cursor and keep clicking. Since ID automagically converts any empty frame to a text frame for you (by default), this really wreaks havoc on a document. Much like a person who is in a rush who keeps pressing an elevator button in hopes that the elevator will arrive sooner, a frustrated designer keeps clicking the mouse when they see things that confuse them on the screen.
Great tip. I always say that sometimes, instructors (and I include myself) take a certain level of application use for granted. But then when we share these little tips, we realize how many people actually gain from it.
We need more of these “little” things
Great li’l tip, David, for I too have been annoyed by this! And smacked my forehead when I read the li’l solution.
Of course I’m still annoyed by the mere *visibility* of the “out” ports in full Preview mode! Why the heck can’t that, too, be hidden — like grids and baselines and hidden characters — when I press “W” to Preview my page?! What were they thinking? “Yes, we’ll make a Preview mode, which shows the page in its final perfect state — except for one annoying little red box with a plus sign. Yes, that should please everybody.”
So we have the ridiculous situation that the *only* way to fully preview InDesign docs is *outside* of ID: as PDFs in Acrobat.
A slight Korrektion to my previous post (before our gracious hosts pounce on me!): no, it’s not really the “Out” port which appears in Preview mode, but the Overset warning box — which also functions as an Out port. And it’s damn annoying when we want to Preview our pages: this little warning is NOT part of how the page will print or PDF-display.
Hey Lauren, not only can you double-click on a side handle to crop a frame, but you can do so on any handle, and it can be a graphic or a text frame. Whichever side or corner you double-click on is the side that will be cropped. For example, if you have a graphic that is in the lower right portion of a frame and you want to get rid of the extra space in the upper left, double-click the upper left handle.
[Here's a movie of this feature in action.]
Thanks for that additional info, Lynn! Yes, those little double-clicks can be extremely useful in CS3. (Yes, folks, that’s only in CS3. Hey, it’s almost 2008, it’s time to upgrade!)
Oh wow! Thanks, Lynn. These smaller smack-yourself-in-the-forehead tips are the best! (=
Great tip David.
Speaking about clicking text frames, here’s another that I always forget.
If you have created a button frame that contains text, you can’t simply double click to open the Button options dialog box.
If you do, you will switch to the Type tool and get an insertion point within the text.
Hold the Opt/Alt key and double click and you will open the Button options.
my favourite thing to do is just press CTRL ALT and C and the box resizes to fit. Handy. Doesn’t work with text boxes all the time.
I am disappointed because it doesn’t work when you have the text tool active and you press Ctrl to temporarily use the selection tool
Thank you! This is really one of the more annoying shortcomings of ID.
Very cool find.
I’d love to see a list of little “duh” discoveries like this.
The other day I saw someone drag a color swatch directly onto the stroke around a frame… I almost swallowed my tongue. “You can do that???”
Regarding Eugene’s comment (14.) about the CTRL ALT and C command not always resizing text frames to the content, I think it does work all the time except with multiple-column text frames.
Also, thanks to Lynn Grillo (10.) for the movie of the CS3 double-click handles to resize function. I’m surprised that clicking on some of the handles actually rebreaks the text. What determines what the new width of the frame will be?
Hi Mona,
For me, in text boxes that are one line, I can CTRL ALT C and it makes it the one size. If the text goes onto two lines, without a forced break, then the box does not resize entirely to the text. It gets the height right, but not the width, using CS2. I’m not sure of the reaction in CS3 but I think it might be the same.
Mona: Double-clicking on the right or bottom-right handle will resize a text frame, attempting to fit the frame to the text… or, put a different way: It resizes until the text fills the frame.
If the frame has only one line, it doesn’t need to change break lines. But if there is more than one line of text, it will often change line breaks.
Also — as I think you noted — this feature does not work on frames that have more than one column, or frames that are threaded with other frames. That is unfortunate.