Text In and On a Path

David Blatner

1

Kathleen wrote in with a problem: “I have a file that has two boxes that seriously has us stumped us here. Can you help us figure out what on earth is going on with these weird handles? As you can see, one is a graphic box and one is a text box.”

I got a hold of one of these files and opened it and the problem was, indeed a weird one (this is my own recreation of the problem… not her company’s file):

Everytime she clicked on the graphic frame or the text frame, she got these extra lines and boxes showing up. The lines moved with the frames, so they appeared linked somehow. To be honest, I didn’t recognize the problem at first. My first thought was to export as INX… after all, there had to be some corruption here, no? But INX didn’t help at all.

Then, instinctively, I tried turning on View > Show Text Threads and got an even bigger surprise:

Something was definitely linked. But it wasn’t an anchored object (didn’t have the right icons). It wasn’t a group (didn’t have dashed lines). What was it?

Then it hit me: It was text on a path! There are all kinds of clues here, including the little “flip” line halfway along the path (bottom of earth image, and top of text frame) which you can drag to the opposite side of the path to flip the text around.

Yes, any kind of frame can have text on a path… even text frames. In this case, the text was actually threaded from inside the path to on the path. Very trippy.

In these cases, she didn’t really want type on the outside of the frames; it was an accident. The solution is to choose Type > Type on a Path > Delete Type from Path.

Sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to see.