When I add text to my CS5 InDesign Classroom In a Book document, the graphic disappears. (Lesson 3)

Question

As soon as I add the threaded text, the graphic at the bottom of the right hand page vanishes. The book mentions nothing about this. Help! I'm trying to teach myself this program and don't want to move forward until I know the solution to this problem. Anybody? Please? (Thank you for any wisdom you may be able to offer.)

Answer 1

I dug out my CIB and took a look at lesson 3 (I used to use the CIB as a text in my classes so I know some of the problems you're likely to encounter).
On page 69 there are instructions to create a frame on the bottom of the right-hand master page and that's the frame that the image should be placed into (and it shold have text wrap applied). It's typical of the CIB that this frame doesn't appear in the illustrations on pages 73 or 75.
On page 73 you added a text frame on the right page, and that frame, for no really good reason extends across the previously created image frame. They do this in the lesson to show you how text wrap works, but in the real world it would be much better in a template situation like this to to simply stop the text frame at the top of the image frame since your text will never use the bottom portion anyway the way this particular page is laid out.
In any case, I suspect what happened was that when you placed the image of the fellow on the jet ski you somehow failed to place it in the image frame from the master page. This would have been a relatively easy mistake to make as the only area of the frame that would accept the image is the part that is not covered by the text frame. I can't tell for sure exactly what happened without seeing the file at the point of failure, however, and I quite honestly don't understand why the image would have disappeared unless, as Michael suggests, you had an active text cursor and place the image inline. This seems unlikely, given the instructions in the lesson, and I would have expected an inline image to appear at the start of the thread in the text frames, not at the end, so I don't think this is really what happened.
One general principle you need to know when placing content into existing frames is you want to click in a clear space inside the frame, not on or near any guides or the frame edges. It doesn't matter where you click, as long as it is inside the frame area -- the frame will fill, or in the case of threaded tex frames the thread will fill from the beginning regardless of where in the thread you click (part of the point of this lesson). Neither the book, nor any documentation I've seen, ever mentions that clicking on a guide, even if it is inside the frame area, will abort the placement into the frame and will instead create a new frame at the point where you clicked. You can tell what is going to happen by watching the cursor closely. If it looks like it has a hard corner in the upper left, it will create a frame, if it seems to be surrounded by parentheses it will use the empty frame you are hovered over.  And, of course, if there are two overlapping frames, you must be sure which one you are using -- if you click in an area of overlap, the top frame will be used.