Prepress
Smart Layout Tutorial – Create an Article and adjust the height of columns
Tuesday 17. June 2008 - WoodWings Smart Layout plug-in for Adobe InDesign is an indispensable tool for any newspaper or magazine designer.
It will do the following for you:
Create complex text frames with ease
Work efficiently with multiple columns
Save a lot of your valuable time
Create consistency throughout your documents
Can be used with Smart Styles and Smart Catalog for even greater efficiency
Let’s take a look at two examples.
In both examples, we are working on an article and an advertisement. In the first scenario, the advertisement has already been placed on the page in an earlier stage, and the article needs to be added afterwards. The second scenario is the other way around, as the article is already on the page, while the ad yet has to be placed.
Scenario 1 – Create an article that flows around the ad
Smart Layout works with the Article concept. This is a new object type in InDesign. Articles can contain a collection of images, text and other objects that together behave as one object. When moving or resizing Smart Layout Articles, they behave intelligently – for example, columns can be changed automatically on the fly.
Imagine that an advertisement is already on your page, and you need to create a text frame in InDesign that flows around the ad. This would involve a number of consecutive steps, like creating separate text frames for each column, linking them, and grouping them together. Resizing the columns in your text frame would involve even more steps.
Not with Smart Layout! You can create just one new Smart Layout Article frame, and it will automatically flow around the existing objects on your page, in this case the ad. Youll be able to control all aspects of the Article, like number of columns, their width, gutter, etc. Life can be so easy at times…