Before we explain this and the following functions, we will look
at the idea of text piping
. Imagine that you are writing a
book. The text which ends at the bottom of one page should continue at
the top of the next. When you delete a paragraph on the current page,
the text should flow back from the following page to fill the space.
Similarly when you insert text: The text that no longer fits on the
page should be pushed forward onto another page. In other words, text
should be able to flow back and forth between different pages. Several
of these text flow connections result in a text flow or piping chain.
Naturally, the same applies for text flow between two frames on a page
(say when using more than one column).
The function Text flow from frame to frame
allows you to
join any two or more text frames to form a piping chain. First, select
the frame from which the text should flow; this frame must not already
have a text piping connection to another frame, though text from
another frame may flow into this one. Next, click on the Text flow
from frame to frame
icon. When you move the mouse pointer back to
the layout window, you will notice that its shape has changed and will
be displayed as:
Now you can click with this cursor on the frame to which the text
should flow. The second frame will now become selected and have an
arrow in its top left corner to show that text is flowing into it from
another frame in a piping chain. The first frame will have an arrow in
the bottom right corner to show that text is flowing out of it. Now,
since the second frame is already selected, you can click on a third
frame to which the text should flow when there is no more room in the
first and second frames. Once you have finished clicking on frames,
click on the Text flow from frame to frame
icon again to end
the function.
Incidentally, it is not necessary to have all the frames in a
piping chain on the same page. For example, you can even pipe text
from a frame on page 5 to a frame on page 8, back to page 6, and then
forward to page 11 (which is only very seldom a good idea, however).
For a more practical application, there are also two special functions
(Piping from previous page
and Piping to next page
, see
below) that create the corresponding text flow connections
automatically when adding or deleting pages.
In addition this function also joins index and footnote frames in a piping chain (see above). Before Calamus can format footnotes or index entries, it must know to what text they are related. If a portion of text is marked as a footnote, it will transferred to footnote frame(s) assigned to the current text frame (the same applies to index entries, of course). The assignment itself is done in the same way as for normal text flow piping links between frames: Click first on the text frame, then on the relevant footonote or index frame. It is now possible to make entries in index or footnote frames, as described in the Text module documentation.
Tip: If during automatic chaining of text frames from one page to the next you collide with Calamus's automatic page scrolling, just press the [Alternate] key, which switches off page scrolling for the time being.
