From the course: InDesign Secrets

336 Create perfect triangles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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336 Create perfect triangles

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- [Instructor] Okay, let's say I want to make a triangle. I'll head over to the tool panel and I'll grab the pen tool. Then I'll just click, click, click, click. And you'll see I have a triangle. Now, it's not a very good triangle. It's not very precise. But fortunately, there are several ways to get a perfect triangle. Here, let me show you. First, let me go ahead and select that with the selection tool, and then hit the Delete key to delete it. Now, I'm going to drag out a rectangular frame. I'll just use the rectangle frame tool and drag out a frame here. Now, I can turn this into a triangle in several ways. One way is to just delete a corner point. I'll switch back to the pen tool by pressing the P key on my keyboard. And now I'm going to hover on top of one of these corner points. You'll see that the cursor for the pen tool, when you hover on top of a corner point, gets a little minus on it. That means when I click, it's going to remove that point. And now I have a perfect right triangle. That's cool, huh? But what if I don't want a right triangle? What if I want an equilateral triangle? Well it's easy. I'm going to undo this with a Command + Z or a Control + Z on Windows. And now I'll switch back to the selection tool by pressing the V key on my keyboard. You can change any shape into any other shape inside the convert shape menu. And you'll find that at the bottom of the object menu way down here. You'll see inside convert shape, there's an option called triangle. And when I choose that, my rectangle turns into an equilateral triangle, where these two top sides are exactly the same length. Okay, now what if I want an isosceles triangle instead? That's where all three sides are exactly the same length. Well you can do this, but you have to do a little bit of math, but it's really easy. Let me show you. First, you need to make sure the height and width of the triangle is the same. So I'll head up to the control panel, and I'm going to change the width to 20 picas, and also the height to 20 picas. Now I know the width of the triangle is the same. Now I'm going to go back and click inside the height field, and I'm going to ask InDesign to do a little bit of math for me. First, I'm going to type the asterisk, or the star, and that means multiply, right? So I'm multiplying this value by another number. And that number is point, that's the dot or the period, and then a long number, 866 0254. I know that's crazy, but that's the math. Multiply by 0.8660254, and then I'll press Return or Enter, and that tells InDesign to do the math for me. And now I have a triangle where all three sides are exactly the same length. Well, okay, if you're a math professor, you know that it's not exactly right, but this is as precise as InDesign can get. So next time you need a perfect triangle, now you know how.

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