- 1. Spanning and Splitting Columns
- 2. Animation
- 3. Multi-State Objects
- 4. Object Selection and Editing
- 5. Different Page Sizes
- 6. Live Captions
- 7. Track Changes
- 8. Enhanced Layers Panel
- Conclusion
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4. Object Selection and Editing
Arranging and modifying layout frames is a common task for any layout designer. With InDesign CS5, the Selection tool has turned into a sort of Swiss-army knife. Use the one tool to select, rotate, resize, reposition, crop, scale frames and frame content, duplicate, and apply corner effects.
Try this. With the Selection tool, hold the pointer over an image. You'll see a donut icon in the middle of the image. This is called the Content Grabber. If you drag the Content Grabber, you pan the image within the frame. Click the Content Grabber to select the image, or click the image outside the Content Grabber to select the frame. Double-click to toggle between selecting the frame and image.
Now, with the same Selection tool still selected, hold the pointer over a corner handle. When the pointer changes to a curved arrow, drag to rotate the selected item.
Next, click the yellow box in the upper right corner of the selected object to activate Live Corners. Curve the corners of a frame just by dragging the corner itself. While dragging, experiment with modifier keys to apply the effect to only one corner or to change the corner effect, like Fancy or Beveled.
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Figure 4 Use the Selection tool to pan an image within a frame, rotate the image, and apply corner effects.
That's not all. You can duplicate an object into a grid using the Selection tool. Hold down Alt/Option and start dragging. Release Alt/Option, and then press arrow keys while you drag. This is called grid mode. The right and up arrow keys increase the number of columns and rows. You can create a grid when you place images, when you're dragging objects, or when you're creating a shape. Again, do all this without switching tools.