InDesign: How to create boxes with tables for a clear text structure - CS5 Tutorial (Part 6b)

Hello, and welcome to the second part of the InDesign table tutorial
If you missed the first part, you can click here and watch it.
Today we going to talk about, how to use tables to create little boxes
that can contain content like this
for example; Quotes or some Math or Programing stuff.
And on the next tutorial, over here, we going to talk about how to use tables for pictures.
But lets get started with our boxes today! Lets go! = )
We start by creating a new master page
And we call this "Table Box Template".
On this page we will store all our
boxes, that we can use in the text.
We first need to create a new text frame
that can hold our tables.
And we copy some text to play around with.
We are using a table as a box
and our table should have 2 columns
because if we use it for a mathematical formula
we always want to have a numbering
on this side as well,
and we need an extra column for this.
Go on *OK* and create a table.
As always we want to use a table style.
We going to create a new one and call it "Box".
Next we want to define a new colour for our border.
We go to the colour panel and we set
the opacity of the black to 30% to get a grey.
And by right clicking on this bar here
you can go on *Add to Swatches*.
And you add this colour to you Swatches.
Black 30%
Now we take care of the table style.
We go on *Edit*
and in here in *Table setup*
you define the spacing before and after the table.
7 mm and 2 mm should be fine.
Next we take care of the cell styles.
We first going to define the left column.
That should have a big thick line here
and no lines on the other sides.
We call this one "Box left cell".
In *Strokes and Fills*
we want to set it to 0pt.
Triple click in here and than select the left stroke
and set it to 5pt.
The colour should be "Black 30%", click on *OK*.
Than we define the style for the right column.
We call this one "Box right cell"
and in *Strokes and fills* we set the thickness to 0pt.
And click again on *OK*
We need to go in our cells menu and get rid of our previous formatting.
By clicking this button.
And now we see we get this stroke on the left side.
I can paste some math in here.
And I going to change the paragraph style to
our font.
And now you see, its not very well aliment with the rest of the box.
I going to increase the insets.
We can do this in the cell styles.
We start with the left cell.
Go on *edit* -> *text*
and let's set 3 mm on each side.
Now i going to deactivate the chains
and i will increase the indent on the left
till its aliment with the text.
I will choose the same indent on the right.
We go on *OK*.
And we will add an 3 mm indent
to the right cell as well.
Lets open up a new folder
for our box.
And we create a new paragraph style and call it "Math".
On the right side we want to have some numbering, like this.
And we move it further to the right.
Imagine we would further develop this calculation,
we would ad a second line
and than we also need to add a number.
However it would be really nice if we could have
the numbering in here automatically and dynamic.
So if you would have
like 10 different formula and than you would
delete one in between
that the numbering would change automatically.
We can do this
by creating a separate paragraph style
for this numbers.
Lets create a new paragraph style
and call it "Math Numbers"
and we want to have it based on "Math".
In here we want to got to *Bullets & Numbering*.
And we want to have *Numbers*.
Again we need to define a new list
we call it "Box Math"
an click on *OK*.
And in here
we add some brackets
and we can click on *OK*.
Now we delete the old "(1)"
and you see if we apply "Math Numbers"
and we have nothing written at all
it doesn't show up, so we need to hit the [Space bar]
to get this spacing that the number shows up.
And we do the same thing for the line below.
That is our Math box!
And the really nice thing is, that we
actually can link to those numbers in the text.
So if we would explain
this calculation in this sentence
we could put a reference to this "(2)".
We would go on *Hyperlinks*
*Create a new cross reference*
Click the "Math Numbers (box)"- Style
chose formula "(2)"
and use *Paragraph Number* as a format.
We click on *OK*
and if we would change the numbers
over here, by inserting some more lines
we could update this numbers as well.
One last thing with Math formula
we should always use the table we have here as a template.
Its also stored in the master page
because in our style the distance between our two columns is not defined.
And we always want to have the same column width
in our thesis. So if we copy the whole thing
every time we need to use
a formula we will have a nice consistent layout
of our box, over the whole thesis.
The next type of box we want to create is for quotations.
We going to copy the old box.
and paste it in here
and we only need one line
so can delete this row
and just stretch the box so it fits to the page.
We can delete this as well.
And we will copy some parts of the text
as our quote.
Something like this.
We need to add of cause a source of our quotation.
lets just say "Bob 2006"
and we can also add quotation marks.
To give the whole thing a good style
we should create a new paragraph style for this as well
we call this "quotation".
We need to get rid of the indent in the beginning.
Set this to 0 and redefine the style.
And than i would like to have the whole text italic.
I will select the first paragraph
and assign the character style italic.
This looks alright
and we can go to our last box
that is for programing.
We will copy this box
And get rid of the first line.
And than we also replace this line with some programing stuff.
However we want to change the font
to for example "Monaco"
To get the same distance between each letter.
And also the size is a little bit big
so we reduce the size and also put the spacing on auto.
We should define a new paragraph style for this as well.
We click on new and call this one "Program".
We would still need to add some colour in here (to make it more readable)
but we can do this automatically.
This will be some thing for another lecture where we are using GREP styles.
Finally we need to do some cleaning up, because this will be our template.
We delete the text between.
And there you have it!
Nice boxes that you can use
for your thesis.
If I want to use a box
I can copy it
got to the page in the thesis where i want to use it.
Paste it in
make sure you have a return over here
and then copy
some quote for example
and again apply the italic font.
and there you go, that's it for today!
In the last and final table video I going to show how to add a table
to give this pictures a really nice layout.
If you want to watch the video, you can click here and watch it.