As you look at this page, you will see that every frame is a rectangle. InDesign is more flexible than that. We do have other options so with our selection tool active. Select one of these middle frames, pressing the delete key again and this time instead of drawing a rectangular frame, you could choose the ellipse frame.
Click and drag, dragging will create an ellipse. If you hold shift, that will constraint it to a circle. You can really create any thing you like. You could drag the textual here and designate that this is a text frame or you could just grab the selection tool. Click this first frame and grab this upward and then flow that into this middle frame.
You can actually see here that frames with a variety of shapes can have text float in and out of them. So, we are flowing from this rectangle into the circle. Here is the in port, through the circle out port and into this next frame.
We can have all sorts of different shape frames and we can even have text on a path. So, let us take a look at that. I will delete this circle, and I am going to grab the pen tool. I am just going to create a simple path. I will click and drag to the right and then down here, I will click and drag to the right again, and up here I will click and drag to the right one more time kind of making a U-shape.
Now, if you are not very comfortable with the pen tool that is okay. Another really option would be just to grab the pencil tool and you could just draw some kind of a squiggle or something like that. Lots of options, I will go ahead and undo that last step, CTRL Z on Windows or command Z on the MAC because I am going to go ahead and use this little shape I drew.
I am going to grab not the type tool but the type on a path tool. So, with that tool active, I will click on the path. Notice that I am next to the path. I have type tool kind of a line through it. I have to place the type on the path tool right on top of that path and then I will get a little visual cue here. There is a plus mark next to my cursor that indicates that I am in the right location and I click and I can actually type on that path.
What you see here are the default type on a path options. We do have several other settings that you can control. I will show them to you briefly and then leave it to you to experiment with the different options but go ahead up to the type menu, choose type on a path and options. We will move this dialog box up so we can see what we are doing. Make sure preview is on and the most interesting options are here under effect.
This is the rainbow effect. We have a skew effect which in this case is a little hard to read. We have 3D ribbon which can be pretty interesting, stair step and gravity which is a specially found on rectangular shapes and actually putting texts on all sides of the shape.
We do have some other alignment options that will control how the text is aligned to the path that it is working on and you can also choose whether or not the path is aligned to the center of the path, to the top or the bottom.
Also, think of different options. I will let you go ahead and play with those. I am going to cancel for now and just stick with the basic options but what I also want to show is text on a path cannot only be achieved in InDesign but it can also threaded.
So, what we will do is make sure our type tools are selected. Select all of this type. You can even press CTRL A or command A to make sure you get all of it and press the delete key. That deletes the text on the path but not the path itself.
What we will do now is grab the selection tool, grab this first frame and click it upward so that path is a little tricky to see right now but hover your cursor over where you think it is. You will see your cursor change into the link icon that indicates that you have the right target and now you can click.
In this case, the text is now flowing from the frame on the left over the text on the path and then to these other frames here on the right.
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