This week I am going to share how to link text boxes across multiple pages for text-overflow in Adobe InDesign.
If you're getting the overflow text error, or if you're trying to connect multiple text boxes, or if you're flowing text across multiple pages (like for a book or magazine), this video includes time-saving tricks to help you work faster.
If you’re new around here, I have been creating a series of short tutorials to help with some of my frequently asked questions on using Adobe InDesign.
Watch the tutorial below for a run-down of how to link text boxes across multiple pages for text-overflow in Adobe InDesign. Or keep reading for the notes from the video tutorial, if you prefer to read the tips. And if you’re a fan of YouTube, click here to subscribe to my channel for more design tutorials and tips!
First up, a refresher – when working with text in InDesign, you have to draw a text box for the text to be housed in, you can’t just click your cursor once and start typing like you can do in Photoshop and Illustrator.
So let’s draw our text box first, and I’m going to fill this with some placeholder text just for this example. (Type > Fill with Placeholder Text)
Now let’s say the amount of text you have is more than the size of your box – this is called Overflow. If this is the case, you’ll see this little red plus sign appear in the lower right corner of your text box.
If you want to flow your text into a new text box, click this plus sign, then immediately start drawing a new text box, and your text will automatically spill over into the new box.
If you want to expand your current text box to show all the rest of your text that is being hidden, double click on any scale arrow (corner or sides of the text box, NOT the red plus sign.), and this will expand your box out to match the amount of text you have.
Want to know my most favorite time-saving trick for flowing text boxes? If you have a lot of pages and need to flow text to every page with uniform margins – like for a book – follow the same steps we just did, but when you draw your 2nd text box, just hold Shift and click once in the top left corner of your margin on the second page. I’ll make my text obnoxiously large again so you can see this in action. A new box will appear on that page + every page after to the exact size of your margins until your text runs out. InDesign will even add more pages automatically if it runs out of room. This is such a huge time saver!
Want to learn more about InDesign? Check this out 👇
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