Linking and Unlinking Text Frames

You can link one text frame to another to make the text continue—or “flow”—from frame to frame. In InDesign, the controls for linking and unlinking text frames are the “in port” and “out port” icons on the text frames themselves. The process of linking text frames in InDesign is similar to working with the “windowshade handles” on PageMaker text blocks, and should feel familiar to PageMaker users. There’s no need to go to the Toolbox to get a special “linking” tool, as there is in QuarkXPress.

When you link text frames together, you’re threading stories through the text frames. When you place text to create a series of linked text frames, you’re flowing text.

The text in a story has a direction—it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When we speak, in this section, of a particular text frame appearing before or after another, we’re talking about its position in the story, not relative to its position on the page.