by Chad Neuman

This is part 4 of 5. Be sure to follow along from part 1.

Step One
Open the newspaperlayout.indd we created in part 1, 2, and 3. Open the Pages palette and double-click on page 1 icon to navigate to the first page.

Step Two
Now we need to add titles to the articles. The default titles for the articles are in the first line of each article, so we’ll need to remove them from there and put it above the articles. Navigate to the top of the page by using the Hand tool (hold down the Spacebar and click-and-drag if the Selection tool is selected by default). With the Text tool, click-and-drag a text box across the top of the article.

Step Three
Type in the text: “Committee Meeting Suspended Until Tuesday.” Remove the same text line from the beginning of the article. With the Text tool, click anywhere in the title and go to Edit>Select All to select the text. Click the “title” style in the Paragraph Styles palette to apply the style.

Step Four
With the text of the title still selected, change the text size to 24 points up on the Control palette. This has the text run across the top without going too far to go off the page or text box. In newspaper headings, sometimes it’s centered, but it’s pretty standard to have it left-justified and run all the way across the story.

Step Five
Next, let’s enter a subtitle. Click-and-drag a text box below the title and enter this text: “County Committee Asks for Time to Decide on Electrical Power Issues.” Apply the “title” style by clicking on it in the Paragraph Styles palette after selecting all the text with the Text tool. Change the font size to 15.5 in the Control palette.

Step Six
Now let’s format the byline in a different style that the rest of the body text. Select it with the Text tool by clicking-and-dragging over “By Alice Stugall.” It’s automatically justified, so change it to center by clicking the Center justify in the Control palette at the top of the screen. Next, click the Paragraph palette and change the first line indent from 2p0 to 0p0 to remove the indent.

Step Seven
Next, let’s move the text boxes of the article to the top so they fill the entire page. Click-and-drag the top borders of the text boxes and drag them to just below the subtitle. They aren’t perfectly aligned yet. The page should look something like this.

Step Eight
Now we need to align the lines of text. Zoom into the document and click-and-drag a ruler guide by clicking-and-dragging from the top ruler. If the ruler is not showing, to go View>Show Rulers. Drag the ruler guide just below the first line of text. Use the keyboard arrows to move the text columns up and down after selecting them with the Selection tool to align the columns.

Step Nine
Next, let’s insert the photo for this story. Go to File>Place and select “construction.jpg” and click Open. To resize placed images in InDesign, be sure to hold Cmd (PC: Ctrl) before clicking on the corner of the bounding box of the image. Click-and-drag the corner to resize it, and be sure to hold Shift to maintain proportion. Release the mouse button before letting go of either keys. Resize it to about this size.

Step Ten
Let’s crop out part of the sky in this photo. To crop, don’t hold any keys, but just click-and-drag with the Selection tool the top of the bounding box and drag it down.

Step Eleven
Next, let’s add a caption. We don’t want to add a text wrap yet to the photo, because then the caption would be pushed away from the photo. Move the photo off the document area by clicking-and-dragging it with the Selection tool. Click-and-drag with the Text tool a text box right below the photo. Be sure to keep all elements at least one pica apart, so don’t let it be flush to the photo. Type in this text: “The committee plans to talk about the electrical power imact of the new condominiums.” Click the “caption” style in the Paragraph Styles palette to apply this style to the caption.

Step Twelve
Next, we need to add a text wrap to the photo and the caption together. With the Selection tool, click-and-drag around both the photo and the caption. Go to Object>Group to make the two items one group. With the group selected, open the Text Wrap palette and click the third option, Wrap around an object shape.

Step Thirteen
With the Selection tool, click-and-drag the photo and caption group onto the top right corner of the article. The article will wrap around it. If you want more of the sky showing to push the text to avoid blank spaces along the bottom just click-and-drag the top bounding box border with the Selection tool. The text in the two right-most columns may be unaligned vertically with the other ones, so try clicking-and-dragging the top bounding box border of those two columns so they are below the caption. Then use a ruler guide to adjust and align the columns.

Step Fourteen
If you have an extra line of space at the end, try adding a Return after a sentence to start a new paragraph somewhere it would make sense. This is acceptable in news stories in order for the article to fit the area. The first page should look something like this. Save this file as “newspaperlayout.indd” for the next tutorial in this series. We’ll cover how to avoid awkward spacing in article columns by using tracking as well as adding pull quotes in the next tutorial.