Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Design Premium All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter 3. Drawing in InDesign

In This Chapter

• Discovering the drawing tools

• Drawing and editing shapes and paths

• Introducing corner effects

• Working with fills and layers

Many of the tools that you find in the InDesign toolbox are used for drawing lines and shapes on a page. This means you have several different ways of creating interesting drawings for your publications. You can create anything from basic shapes to intricate drawings inside InDesign, instead of having to use a drawing program like Illustrator. Even though InDesign doesn't replace Illustrator (see Book III), which has many more versatile drawing tools and options for creating intricate drawings, InDesign is adequate for simple drawing tasks. In this chapter, you discover how to use the most popular InDesign drawing tools and how to add colorful fills to your illustrations.

Getting Started with Drawing

When you're creating a document, you may want drawn shapes and paths to be a part of the layout. For example, you may want to have a star shape for a yearbook page about a talent show or to run text along a path. Whatever it is you need to do, you can draw shapes and paths to get the job done.

Paths and shapes

Paths can take a few different formats. They can either be open or closed, with or without a stroke:

• Path: The outline of a shape or object. Paths can be closed and have no gaps, or they can be open like a line on the page. You can draw freeform paths, such as squiggles on a page, freely by hand.

• Stroke: A line style and ...