Make sure you’ve carefully followed the first two sets of instructions and have your pages set up correctly!

You will need a list of names FROM HERE. You can choose whichever list you like. Download that list and put it in your Yearbook folder.

You’ll also need pictures. We’ll use the icons you can get HERE. Again, download that list and put it in your Yearbook folder.

You’ll need to put that list of names into the text boxes. You could copy and paste each one into a separate box OR you can get InDesign to fill the boxes for you!

Right now each box is separate, but you can link them together so text can flow from box to box. On the right edge of any text frame, there’s a white square in the middle.

If you press that, you can create a link (notice the chain) and click on another box to link them together.

Keep linking the boxes all the way across. When you get to the last one in the row, link it to the next row below.

Keep going until you get to the very last one.

Go back and select the very first box. Go to File/Place, or Ctrl + D and find the list of names that you should have in your Yearbook folder

Once you select that text file, you will see text attached to your cursor.  Go click on the first text box:

If you’ve linked all of your boxes correctly, you should see a mess of text in all of the boxes:

Highlight a name and go to your Properties panel. Change the font FOR SURE, plus make any other changes you want to colour, size, spacing, alignment, etc.

Note that due to the limited space in those boxes and the long names that some students have, you will almost certainly need text on two lines. I hit enter between the first person’s first and last names

Here’s one of those cool InDesign tricks that will save you a lot of time later.

Open the Paragraph Styles panel (Window/Styles/Paragraph Styles)

I use that one all of the time, so I added it to my icons on the right hand side. Drag that panel into that strip and you can open it from there any time.

If you double click the name of that paragraph style, you can rename it and make changes to it. I’ll name mine portrait names:

and if you wanted to, you could make any change to the style and all of the text that has that style applied will be changed.

If you select all of your text (put your cursor into any text box and press Ctrl + A) then press that new style, all of the text will have the exact same formatting. This comes in handy if you’re doing other pages of the yearbook and want the text to look the same.

As mentioned earlier, all names should be on two lines. Unfortunately, you have to go name by name and hit enter (there’s probably an easier way, but I don’t know what it is. Let me know if you can find out!)

As I’m going through, I notice a big problem with some names that are really long

 

Lucia’s name does not fit properly even on two lines. If hers is like that, there are bound to be others. I’ll try adjusting the style and making it a bit smaller

That still isn’t enough in Lucia’s case. Sometimes, you have to adjust just one name. If you highlight text and don’t adjust the Paragraph Style, you can add other characteristics to just that highlighted text. Obviously, I could try a smaller font for her name, but that can stand out if the size of one name is obviously smaller than the others.

In order to avoid that, I’ll highlight Lucia’s name and go into my Properties panel:

At the bottom right of the Character section, there are three dots that will open up more options:

There are some other things you can try if you need to make text fit in a smaller space.

One is Tracking, which will pull the letters closer together and get rid of some of the space between. This can make text harder to read.

Another is Horizontal Scale, which makes the letters themselves narrower. Again, getting too carried away will distort the text and make it harder to read.

Lucia’s name now fits better

If you look in the Paragraph Styles panel, you’ll notice a plus sign, which indicates that the style has been modified for this text

This looks MUCH better, but there’s a problem. I can only get to names that start with F on this page, so I’m going to need more:

Zoom out (Ctrl + 0)

Draw a box to select everything on the page:

And do that Alt + Shift drag trick to create a copy on the opposite page:

But that page now has the same names as the first one. Put your cursor inside of any of those boxes and then press Ctrl + A to select all of the text:

Hit Backspace or Delete and voila:

Now, just link the bottom right frame on the first page to the first frame on the new page:

Then you have to go through and put the names all on two lines, and that’s it! You will not have enough room on two pages to fit all of the students in any grade. You can create a third page to finish it off if you like, but you don’t really need to.

Next, we put the pictures in. (don’t worry, that’s much easier!)

First, make sure you SAVE your work if you haven’t done so lately!

I don’t have all of the actual portraits yet and sometimes matching them up is a bit of a pain, so we’ll just fill the photo frames with pictures from that icons folder I had you download.

Select the first frame:

 

Go to File/Place or Ctrl + D and find that folder. Select the first one:

These photos aren’t really going to fit properly, so if you run across any that look really goofy, you should click on that centre donut and move the image up or down in the frame so it looks better:

Keep placing those in the frames until you fill the page.

Once you have the frames filled, you can SAVE your work and the hardest pages are done!

If for some reason you don’t have everything in one Yearbook folder (ahem, why not?), you will need to Package your file from time to time to make sure you don’t lose any pieces.