Make sure you’ve carefully followed the first two sets of instructions and have your pages set up correctly!
Before you start, I HIGHLY recommend making an untouched copy of the pages that you have set up. I keep untouched template pages at the bottom of my document all the way along until I reach the end. This way, if I need to add more pages, I don’t need to delete all of the content, I always have a blank template to work from
If you double click on two page numbers in the Pages panel, you can select the spread (both pages)
You can then right-click to duplicate the Spread
Do this as many times as you like! It’s easy to delete extra spreads & pages later
You will need a list of names and the image files. Get them FROM HERE (or look in the Handout folder.) For this part, you want the portraits folder. Download those and put them in your Yearbook folder. You can download them all at once with the .zip file
FYI, a .zip file is a bunch of files combined together to make it easier to download, share, send, etc. You need to unzip those files before you can use them.
If you’re having a great deal of difficulty downloading or unzipping the files, ask me nicely and I may drop them on your desktop!
Download the file:
If you double click that file on a school computer, it will open in a program called 7zip. You need to EXTRACT the files
It will default to wherever you put the .zip file, most likely your Downloads folder.
You can move your files into the right spot right away by clicking the 3 dots to choose where to extract the files, or just move them later
I will browse and extract into my yearbook folder (again, you could just move the files there later.)
You should now see a folder with the individual files in it. You can now open or work with those.
One more reminder, DON’T LEAVE THE FILES IN YOUR DOWNLOADS FOLDER! Move them into your Yearbook folder if you haven’t already.
You’ll need to put that list of names into the text boxes. You could copy and paste each one into a separate box, which might be easier, but it’s VERY time consuming and VERY difficult to fix if you make a mistake OR you can get InDesign to fill the boxes for you! The right way will take a little more setup, but it might save you some hassle later.
Right now each box is separate, but you can link them together so text can flow from box to box. On the right edge of any text frame, there’s a white square in the middle.
If you press that, you can create a link (notice the chain) and click on another box to link them together.
Keep linking the boxes all the way across. When you get to the last one in the row, link it to the next row below.
Keep going until you get to the very last one on your second page.
In the end, all of the grey boxes you see below will be linked:
or perhaps you chose this configuration:
Make sure you have the Selection Tool (v) selected. Click off of your page to make sure that nothing is selected. Go to File/Place, or Ctrl + D and find the list of names that you should have in your Yearbook folder
Here’s a tip that could save you some trouble later:
See that button that says “Show Import Options”? Turn that ON
If you turn that on, another window will pop up. Look for the section about Extra Carriage Returns and make sure those options are turned OFF
Press OK when your window looks like this:
That will make sure that all of the names go on individual lines. If you don’t do that, you’ll have to do some editing later…
Once you select that text file, you will see text attached to your cursor.
You can link text frames together by holding ALT on your keyboard
(you are holding down ALT, right?)
Go click on the first text box:
Keep holding ALT
Keep clicking text frames to link them together. Do this until you have linked/clicked all of the Text frames on 2 spreads/4 pages!
Then let go of ALT
After you do this, you may notice something odd… they appear to be empty!
Here’s something that might help. It’s optional, but recommended.
Go into the View menu, then Extras, and turn on Show Text Threads (or press Ctrl + Alt + y)
those little pink triangles between the grey text frames indicate that each frame is linked to the one next to it. You should see a line connecting the last text frame on one line to the first frame on the next line:
and between pages on the spread, there’s a line that runs from the bottom right on the left page to the top left on the next page
You need about 3.5 pages per grade, so you should link one spread to the next:
In the end, I have something like this:
If you chose to have the names on the side, it would look like this:
So where’s all the text? I thought we Placed it in there!
Well, we did! It’s just too big!
Switch to the Type tool (press t) and click inside of one of the text frames, then Ctrl + a to select all of the text in there
My default text is 13 pt. That’s too big.
I’ll choose a font that looks good to me and bring the size down (choose your own font, don’t copy me!)
And all of a sudden I see that there’s text in there!
But it looks awful! Look how some letters are all spread apart:
Yuck.
On my Properties panel (or at the top of the screen if you’re in the Essentials Classic workspace), find the Alignment options (you could also open the Paragraph panel by looking under the Window menu, then Type & Tables OR just press Ctrl + Alt + T)
Right now, my text is on Justify, which means that it’ll be flush against the left and right margin:
That works if you’re writing a book or magazine, but for this, having text that’s centred would look much better
See! It looks WAY better!
If you’ve linked all of your boxes correctly, you should see text in all of the boxes on 3 pages:
If you’ve chosen the layout with the names on the side, you’ll have to do some adjusting.
Switch to the Type tool (t) and click inside of one of the text frames. Ctrl + a to select everything.
My default text again was way too big
But when I made it smaller, the lines were spaced really far apart:
I need to adjust something called Leading, which is the space between the lines. Usually, switching it to Auto is good enough:
The thing is, you have to adjust your text so that EXACTLY 7 lines appear in each box (unless you changed your layout and have 6 or 8 photos in each row
My settings look like this. You want to choose your own font, colour, size, etc. but again, make sure you have just enough names for the number of photos in each row!
This looks much better:
Remember that optional step that I mentioned a while back where I had you turn on Show Import Options?
If you missed it, you may see more than one name/word in a row:
All of these Pokemon have just one name/one word. If you missed that earlier step, you may have to go into the boxes and press Enter wherever you see more than one word/name.
Your names should look like this:
If your text still doesn’t look good, click inside of a text frame, press Ctrl + a to select everything, then go to your Properties panel. Change the font, colour, size, spacing, alignment, etc. until it looks good to you!
Just make sure they fit properly in the boxes! You may need to adjust the sizing/spacing to ensure that one name/word appears per line if the names are on the side and one name/word per box if you have the names underneath!
I’ve made things easy for you and given you names and images of Pokemon. Most of the names are just one word and most are pretty short, so you should have no trouble fitting them into the frames.
But when doing the actual yearbook with people’s names, due to the limited space in those boxes and the long names that some students have, you will almost certainly need text on two lines. When I’m doing the yearbook, I hit enter between the first person’s first and last names
Here’s one of those cool InDesign tricks that will save you a lot of time later. This part is optional, but helpful:
Open the Paragraph Styles panel (Window/Styles/Paragraph Styles)
I use that one all of the time, so I added it to my icons on the right hand side. Drag that panel into that strip and you can open it from there any time.
If you double click the name of that paragraph style, you can rename it and make changes to it. I’ll name mine “portrait names”
and if you wanted to, you could make any change to the style and all of the text that has that style applied will be changed.
If you select all of your text (put your cursor into any text box and press Ctrl + A) then press that new style, all of the text will have the exact same formatting. This comes in handy if you’re doing other pages of the yearbook and want the text to look the same.
This section may not apply to this particular project/version, but it’s important information:
As mentioned earlier, in the actual yearbook, all names should be on two lines. Unfortunately, you have to go name by name and hit enter (there’s probably an easier way, but I don’t know what it is. Let me know if you can find out!)
As I’m going through, I notice a big problem with some names that are really long
Lucia’s name does not fit properly even on two lines. If hers is like that, there are bound to be others. I’ll try adjusting the style for just her name and making it a bit smaller
That still isn’t enough in Lucia’s case. Sometimes, you have to adjust just one name. If you highlight text and don’t adjust the Paragraph Style, you can add other characteristics to just that highlighted text. Obviously, I could try a smaller font for her name, but that can stand out if the size of one name is obviously smaller than the others.
In order to avoid that, I’ll highlight Lucia’s name and go into my Properties panel:
At the bottom right of the Character section, there are three dots that will open up more options:
There are some other things you can try if you need to make text fit in a smaller space.
One is Tracking, which will pull the letters closer together and get rid of some of the space between. This can make text harder to read.
Another is Horizontal Scale, which makes the letters themselves narrower. Again, getting too carried away will distort the text and make it harder to read.
Lucia’s name now fits better
If you look in the Paragraph Styles panel, you’ll notice a plus sign, which indicates that the style has been modified for this text
This looks MUCH better:
Next, we put the pictures in. (don’t worry, that’s much easier!)
First, make sure you SAVE your work if you haven’t done so lately!
Select the first frame:
Go to File/Place or Ctrl + D and find that folder. Select the first photo. The files should have the exact same name as you see in the Text frame:
(note, for this, you can turn OFF
These photos aren’t really going to fit properly, so you may have to adjust the Frame Fitting Options
If you select the frame (or the image inside of the frame) you can adjust the Frame Fitting options on your Properties panel:
Or if you’re using the Essentials Classic workspace, you’ll likely see those options at the top of the window as well:
You can choose either of the first two options, but I usually use the first one to Fill Frame Proportionally
if you run across any that look really goofy, you should click on that centre donut and move the image up or down in the frame so it looks better:
Keep placing those in the frames until you fill the page. You can do this one at a time…
Or…
You can load multiple images to place.
Click onto a blank spot to deselect any frames
Go to File/Place or Ctrl + d
Click on the first one you want to load/Place. Hold Shift on your keyboard and select one farther down:
Once you’ve selected a range of images, you’ll see them with a blue border and you’ll see a bunch of names in the File Name box at the bottom. Click Open
The loaded image will look a little different and it’ll have the number of images that you’ve loaded. Just go click on the first box to place the first image:
Continue clicking the Frames in order to place the images in order!
In the end, I have something like this:
If you want to be picky (and I like picky), you might notice that some of the images are cut off a bit and they don’t look ideal:
I don’t like how that one sits.
You could either click the donut to grab the image inside of the frame (or double click on the image) and move it around
Or you could adjust those Frame Fitting options so that all of the image is displayed. This means that the frame won’t necessarily be filled, but all of the image will fit:
One other picky thing that I notice is that when I turn my background layer back on, the bright background is making the transparent images a bit harder to see:
You could try turning down the Opacity of the background layer to fade it out a bit. Select it in your Layers panel:
and turn down the Opacity on the Properties panel:
That looks a bit better:
Another way to fix the problem would be to add a Fill to the photo frames:
I locked my background layer, switched to the Selection tool, then dragged a box over all of my photo frames to select them:
Then, on the properties panel, I just added a Fill colour to the photo frames.
Of course, for the real yearbook, we basically repeat the process to add pages for grades 9, 10, 11, and 12, and add a spread for staff photos!
Once you have the frames filled and everything looks good, you can SAVE your work and the hardest pages are done!
If for some reason you don’t have everything in one Yearbook folder (ahem, why not?), you will need to Package your file from time to time to make sure you don’t lose any pieces.