InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 15. Editing and Formatting Text

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Editing text, including highlighting, cutting and pasting, and deleting

• Using the Story Editor

• Correcting mistakes as you type

• Checking spelling as you type or all at one time

• Customizing the spelling and hyphenation dictionaries

• Searching and replacing words and formats

• Adjusting text appearance within text frames

• Placing notes in text

Most users do the bulk of their writing and editing in a word processor before bringing the files into InDesign for layout.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't perform word processor functions in InDesign. It makes a lot of sense to write captions, headlines, and other elements that need to fit a restricted area, as well as to take care of copy editing and minor revisions. InDesign lets you do such writing and editing in the actual layout, or in a built-in text editor that mimics the Mac's TextEdit or Windows' WordPad, except it does layout-specific things for you as well, such as tracking line counts.

Either way, you'll extensively use InDesign's editing, search-and-replace functions, and spell checker to refine your content.

Editing Text

When working in a layout, InDesign gives you the basic editing capabilities found in a word processor: cutting and pasting, and deleting and inserting text. These capabilities work very much like other text editors and word processors, so you should be able to use the techniques you already know to edit text within InDesign.

Controlling text view

But before you begin to ...