Shapes in Adobe InDesign CS2

[W***@adobeforums.com]

First of all I'd like to thank everybody for their excellent help. I am making the switch from MS Publisher to Indesign CS2 and I have many questions that arise that the help center does not answer (at least not specifically) Anyway, I wish to become as good at InDesign CS2 as I am at Publisher so that I can be as helpful to beginners as other forum users have been to me. Now for my questions. Is there any such "autoshapes" in InDesign CS2 as arrows, three dimensional objects, etc. MS Publisher had many "autoshapes" to choose from and I find InDesign's selection (what I've been able to discover) to be lousy. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!!

[F***@adobeforums.com]

In InDesign you have elipse, square, and polygon tools. In the stroke pallet you will find a large variety of arrows, and that's it!

But to leave you with that would be unjust. If you look closely at the MS Publisher autoshapes they are really made up of simple shapes put together. Take an arrow, for example, a rectangle and a triangle. A 3D box, two boxes with lines joining them. These can all be drawn easily when using the basic shapes InDesign gives you and the pathfinder pallet. The pathfinder pallet lets you do all kinds of things with shapes.

At first it might seem like a drag to go through four or five steps to draw a simple shape that took two clicks in Publisher, but the possibilities are endless. Where Publisher is full of templates and autoshapes which dictate what you will use, InDesign lets you do want you want. (I hope I'm not sounding like an Adobe marketer).

Another thing to take a look at Object>Corner Effects... which allows you to do some creative things with the corners.

If you're really in for a challenge you can try and tackle the pen tool. If you get it figured out let me know some pointers. I'm still baffled by it.

As a side point, once you do create a lot of shapes you use often you can put them in a library where they are easily accessible for other InDesign documents.

[S***@adobeforums.com]

You can also convert text to outlines. Text? Yeah, like Zapf Dingbats or Wingdings.