Object Essentials
In this part . . .
The rubber really hits the road when you’ve got your
basic layout structure in place. Now you can focus on
the meat of your documents: the objects that contain your
text and graphics. It’s amazing all the objects you can
create — from simple rectangles to complex curves. And
it’s equally amazing all the things you can do to objects,
such as rotate them, color and align them, and apply
special effects, such as drop shadows and directional
feathers. And you can even save a lot of these settings so
that you can apply them consistently to other objects
later — a real timesaver that also ensures quality results.
Note that you can apply most of these effects to objects
whether or not they already contain their graphics and
text — so if you’re a really structured kind of person,
you’ll probably create your basic object containers first,
apply your effects to them, and then bring in the text and
graphics. But if you’re more free-form in your approach,
you’ll likely bring in all your text and graphics and then
start arranging the objects that contain them to produce
your final layout. That’s fine. Either way, you just apply
the techniques in this part while doing so.