Jun. 3, 2008
An easy way to reduce the empty space within your text frames.
There is a fantastic new feature within Indesign CS3 that allows you to quickly remove any unwanted empty space within a text frame. It’s simplicity is obvious, though there are a few variables depending on what part of the text frame you are clicking that you should be aware of.
So we have a sentence of type (see image below), and as you can see the text frame is way larger that the actual text. Its always best practice to minimize the size of all your frames in your layouts, so you can easily select other page elements without having to use keyboard shortcuts to select through page elements on top of other page elements, and also to minimize transparency effecting page elements unnecessarily.
So the trick is to make sure you have the text frame you want to remove empty space from active, then if your text frame needs to snap up from the bottom and the right as per the image above, you simply double click the lower right corner point of the active text frame, and the frame snaps to the last character on the right and to the baseline of the type (see image below).
I did say there are some variables depending on what part of the text frame you are clicking that you should be aware of so here they are;
- If you double click any corner point two things will happen, the frame with snap both horizontally and vertically in direction
- If you double click the lower centre point of the text frame the result will be the frame snapping to the baseline of the last line of text, however any empty space to the right will remain
- If you were to double click on the centre point on the right side of a text frame the result will be the text frame snapping to the last rightmost character in the frame, however any empty space below will remain.
So depending on what point of the text frame you double click on you will get a certain result. Play around with it, try the other text frame points not mentioned here.
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