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Where do you want the first line of text to sit in your frame?
How far down from the top of the frame? Most InDesign users just fill a frame with
text without giving the first baseline position a second thought.
But when quality and precision counts, you need to control every aspect of your text,
including it's vertical position. Here's how to do it.
I've opened my Javico sheet document, and I'm going to select this text frame, and I'm
going to zoom in on that by pressing Command-2 on the Mac, or
Control-2 on Windows. I'll press W to switch out of Preview mode
so we can see all of the text frames on our page.
Now where is this baseline? How far down from the top of the frame?
Well, I don't really know. But if I go to the Object menu and choose
Text Frame Options, or press Command-B on the Mac, or Control-B on Windows -
move this out of the way so you can see it better - I see that there's a feature called
Baseline Options. If I click on that, here's where I can control
where the first baseline of that text frame is going to sit.
And by default, InDesign sets the baseline to Ascent.
That means the Ascender in this particular font, in this particular size,
will fit flush right against the top of the frame.
Well, the problem is is that different fonts and different sizes have different value,
so I don't know exactly where it's going to be.
So there's other options here as well. For example, I can choose Cap Height.
Cap Height is slightly different in this font than Ascender, so you see it shifted just
a little bit. But what about X Height?
The X Height is the height of an x, or a lower case character in this particular font.
Again, we don't know exactly what that is unless we're the font designer, or if we go
in and take measurements in the font. So it's not precise, it's not helpful for
us. What I usually use is either Leading or Fixed.
Fixed is interesting because this says put it at exactly this position.
Right now it's at 0 points, 0 pica, 0 points away from the top of the frame, and you can
see that the baseline at 0 means that the first line is actually sticking outside
of the frame. It's actually above the frame right now.
If I increase this value, the baseline goes down.
If I set it to, let's say 3 picas, well, we know that it's exactly 3 picas down from the
top of the frame. So that can be very handy.
In most situations, what I use is Leading. I'll set this one back to 0, and we can see
that Leading is going to set it to whatever's the largest leading value in
this line down from the top of the frame. I'll click OK, and we can see that if I select
this text, and I increase its leading by going to the Character mode
of the Control panel, and I change this to, let's say 28 points,
now I know that the baseline is exactly 28 points down from the top of the frame.
This gives me incredible precision, but also gives me a lot of flexibility, and I like
that. On the other hand, I might use the Fixed First
Baseline offset if I'm doing something like a caption.
For example, I'll come over here and draw out a caption frame over here underneath this
image, and I'll type something like copyright Javico,
and I've got the wrong paragraph style applied here,
so I'll open the Paragraph Styles panel, and I'll come up here and apply the Caption Style.
There we go, that's my Caption Style. Now my art director told me that this baseline
needs to be exactly 10 points down from the bottom of this image.
Wow, how am I going to set that up? Well, I simply select the frame with the Selection
tool, I go to Object, Text Frame Options, go to Baseline Options,
and in this case I'm going to use a fixed baseline which is exactly 10 points down from
the top of the frame. There we go.
Now I know that that baseline is exactly 10 points down from the top of the frame.
Cool. Let's move this over. How am I going to make this 10 points down
from the bottom of the image? Well, I'll select both the frame, the text
frame and the image, I'll go to Window menu, choose Object and Layout, click on Align,
and now in the Align panel, I can say that I want to have 0 spacing between these two
selected objects. Click on that and voil?, I'm pretty much done.
Now because the bottom of the image is in exactly the same place as the top of my text
frame, I know that this is exactly 10 points down
from the bottom of the image. How about that?
While I'm here, I might as well right-align these, and I'll also press Command-Shift-R
on the Mac, or Control-Shift-R on Windows, to right-align
the text. So now I know that this text is right-aligned
with the image and exactly 10 points down from the bottom of the image itself.
Very, very cool, very precise. OK, let me show you one other example.
I'll close the Align panel here. I'm going to zoom back to Fit in Window by
pressing Command-0 on the Mac, or Control-0 on Windows,
and let's say I want the first baseline of this text to be exactly 47 picas down from
the top of the page. It doesn't matter where the text frame is,
but I know that I want it exactly 47 picas down from the top of the page.
In fact, I'm going to go over here and place a guide at exactly 47 picas so I can see.
How do I get this to snap down to there? Well, OK, in this case, I'm going to go back
to Object, Text Frame Options, and I'll go back to Baseline Options.
I'll move this out of the way so we can see this better.
I'm not going to use First Baseline Offset up here because this feature only relates
to how far it is from the top of the text frame.
Instead, I'm going to use Baseline Grid, because with this I can actually control
where it fits on the page, where it's sitting on the page.
And I'm going to say I want it to start exactly 47 picas - right?
That's what I chose, that's what my art director told me to do - 47 picas down from - not from
the top inset of the frame, or the frame, or the margin, but the top of
the page. And I'm going to ignore all of these for right
now, and I'll click OK, and now to get this exactly 47 picas down,
I have to select that paragraph, go to the Paragraph Formatting in the Control panel,
and then turn on Aligned Baseline Grid. There we go.
The first baseline snapped exactly to 47 picas down from the top of the page, and this is
cool because if I use the Selection tool and move this around - look at this, no matter
where I move that frame, it's always exactly at 47 picas down.
Isn't that amazing? On the other hand, it did mess up the leading
for the rest of the paragraph, so that's not so good.
We better fix that. I'll go get my Type tool, place my cursor
in the paragraph anywhere, go to the Control panel fly-out menu, and
choose Only Align First Line to Grid. Now, that means the first line is snapping
to the 47 picas, and the rest of the paragraph can fall anywhere it feels like.
So now I've got exactly the setup I want. The first line will always be at 47 picas,
and the rest of the text can be anywhere it wants.
When people say that InDesign gives you an incredible amount of control over your text,
this is the kind of thing that they mean. When you need precision, InDesign has the
tools for you.