6. Fills, Strokes, and Effects

Here’s where you get a chance to express your creativity. Styling refers to applying fills, strokes, gradients, and effects to frames, lines, and text. If you’re bored with plain black text on a white background, InDesign lets you change the text and background colors to almost anything you can imagine.

Most other graphics programs let you style objects and text with fills, strokes, and gradients. InDesign certainly does that also.

However, InDesign offers a plethora of amazing effects such as transparency, drop shadows, and glows. While it has always been possible to create these effects in programs like Adobe Photoshop, having them in a page layout program makes it very convenient to apply those effects ...

Get InDesign CS4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.