Finessing Character Details
In This Chapter
ᮣ Working with character formats
ᮣ Changing font families, styles, and sizes
ᮣ Applying other character formats
ᮣ Controlling horizontal and vertical spacing
When you create documents, you have lots of opportunities to make decisions about how the text appears. With its comprehensive set of character-formatting tools, InDesign lets you change the look of type so that it can precisely match the communication needs of your publications. You can control not just the font and size of type, but also many other variations.
Decisions about type matter. A document relies on good typography to allow others to easily read and understand it. The appearance of type supports the message you’re conveying, and doing a good job of character formatting is worth your time.
Specifying Character Formats
InDesign lets you modify the appearance of highlighted characters or selected paragraphs with the following options:
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Character panel: Highlight the text and open the Character panel (Type➪Character [Ô+T or Ctrl+T]), which is shown in Figure 15-1. (You can also choose Window➪Type & Tools➪Character.) Be sure Show Options is visible in the flyout menu in order to see all the possible options. You can also use the double-arrow iconic button to the left of the panel name to toggle among showing the panel title, the basic options, and all options.
The Character panel provides access to most of InDesign’s character formatting options. Three of the options — Font Family, Font Style, and Font Size — are also available via the Type menu, and several options have keyboard shortcuts.
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Paragraph panel: Select a paragraph and open the Paragraph panel (Type➪Paragraph [Option+Ô+T or Ctrl+Alt+T]). Chapter 14 covers these settings in detail.
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Control panel: The Control panel offers all the formatting options of the Character panel plus others. If the Control panel doesn’t show all the character formatting options, select the text and then click the A iconic button on the panel. If the Control panel isn’t visible (it almost always is), display it by choosing Window➪Control (Option+Ô+6 or Ctrl+Alt+6).
To change the default character formats — the settings that InDesign uses when you type text into an empty frame — make changes in the Character panel or Control panel when no text is selected or when the text-insertion cursor isn’t flashing. That step saves you the hassle of having to reformat new text.
You can choose to apply character formats to highlighted text in two ways: ߜ
Create and apply character styles. Character styles offer an important advantage: A character style’s settings are stored, so you can apply the exact same settings easily to other text. When you change a character style’s settings, any text based on that style is automatically changed to reflect the new settings. (Chapter 13 covers styles in detail.) ߜ
Use the local controls in the Character panel, the Control panel, the Type menu, or their keyboard shortcuts, which I cover in the upcoming sections. Even when you do use character styles, you’ll probably also do some local formatting from time to time. For example, you’d probably use the Character panel to format the type on the opening spread of a feature magazine article and then use character styles to quickly format the remainder of the article.
Figure 15-1:
The Character panel
and its flyout
menu with
all options
shown.
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If you have a smallish monitor, set at 1024 by 768 pixels — the norm for a 17-inch display — the Character and Character Styles panels may be shoved to the bottom of the panel dock. When they’re selected, the only thing you see is their panel tab and flyout menu icon. You have a few choices: Shorten other panel groups in the dock to make room for them, remove other panel groups to make room for them, or drag them out of the dock and make them floating. Modifying Font, Type Style, and Size
Many people use typographic terms — font, face, typeface, font family, and type style — inconsistently. Which terms you use doesn’t matter as long as you make yourself understood, but I recommend becoming familiar with the font-related terms in InDesign’s menus and panels:
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Font or typeface: A collection of characters — including letters, numbers, and special characters — that share the same overall appearance, including stroke width, weight, angle, and style.
For example, Helvetica Regular and Adobe Garamond Semibold Italic are well-known fonts.
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Font family: A collection of several fonts that share the same general appearance but differ in stroke width, weight, and/or stroke angle.
For example, Helvetica and Adobe Garamond are font families.
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Font style: Each of the fonts that make up a font family. When you choose a font family from the Character panel’s Font Family menu, InDesign displays the family’s font style variations — what most of the design world calls type styles — in the accompanying Font Style pop-up menu.
For example, Regular and Semibold Italic are examples of font styles. Changing font family and font style
When you change from one font to another in InDesign, you can choose a new font family and font style independently in the Character panel. For example, changing from Arial Bold to Times Bold or from Arial Regular to Berthold Baskerville Regular is a simple change of font family (Arial to Berthold Baskerville). However, if you switch from, say, Bookman Light to Century Schoolbook Bold Italic, you’re changing both family and style (Bookman to Century and then Light to Bold Italic).
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InDesign can display previews of fonts when you select fonts via the Control panel, various text-oriented panels, and the Type menu. You turn on this capability in the Type pane of the Preferences dialog box by choosing InDesign➪Preferences➪Type (Ô+K) on the Mac or Edit➪Preferences➪Type (Ctrl+K) in Windows. But doing so makes your menus huge, often so much that they’re unwieldy to use. Although it can help you get familiar with your fonts, its unwieldy nature may not be worth that benefit. Only you can decide, but if you do use the preview feature, I recommend keeping the preview size small to limit its size.
Whether you use the Control panel or Character panel, you can choose between two methods for changing the font family:
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Choose the Font Family menu and then select a name from the list of available font families.
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Place the cursor in front of or highlight the font name displayed in the Font Family field, type the first few letters of the font family you want to apply, and then press Return or Enter. For example, entering Cas selects Caslon (if it’s available on your computer).
If you choose only a font family when font styles are available in an accompanying submenu, no changes are applied to the selected text. So be sure to select a font style from the submenu.
When creating character styles, the preceding controls are available in the Basic Character Formats pane of the New Character Styles and New Paragraph Styles dialog boxes.
Changing type size
You can be very precise with type sizes (what InDesign calls font size). InDesign supports sizes from 0.1 point to 1,296 points (108 inches) in increments as fine as 0.001 point. Of course, you want to use good judgment when choosing type sizes. For example, headlines should be larger than subheads, which in turn are larger than body text, which is larger than photo credits, and so on.
Change the type size of highlighted text with the following methods: ߜ
Choose Type➪Size and then choose one of the predefined sizes listed in the Size submenu. If you choose Other from the submenu, the Font Size field is highlighted in the Character panel. Enter a custom size and then press Return or Enter.
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Use the Character panel or Control panel:
1. Choose one of the predefined sizes from the Font Size menu.
2. Highlight the currently applied type size displayed in the
accompanying editable field, enter a new size, and then press
Return or Enter.
3. Make sure that the Font Size field is selected and then use the up and down arrow keys to increase or decrease the size in 1-point increments. Pressing Shift multiplies the increment to 10.
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Control+click or right-click a text selection and then choose a size from the Size submenu. If you choose Other from the submenu, the Font Size field is highlighted in the Character panel. Enter a custom size and then press Return or Enter.
If text is highlighted and the Font Size field is empty, more than one type size is used in the selected text.
When creating character styles, the Font Size control is available in the Basic Character Formats pane of the New Character Styles dialog box. Using Other Character Formats
In the Control panel, you can adjust other character formats, including all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, underline, strikethrough, kerning, tracking, horizontal and vertical scale, baseline shift, skew, font style, and language. Through the flyout menu, you can also set ligatures, modify underline and strikethrough settings, control whether text may break (be hyphenated), select its case (such as all caps and small caps), and select OpenType features. (The next several sections explain each of these terms, except for OpenType features, which let you apply a variety of controls to OpenType fonts — an expert topic that this book doesn’t get into detail on.) In the Character panel, you can adjust kerning, tracking, horizontal and vertical scale, baseline shift, skew, and language. Through its flyout menu (refer to Figure 15-1), you can also set all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, underline, strikethrough, ligatures, and underline and strikethrough settings, as well as control whether text may break (be hyphenated) and select OpenType features. (InDesign also lets you create custom underlines and strikethroughs, as Chapter 16 describes.)
When creating character styles, the kerning, tracking, subscript, superscript, case, ligature, underlining, break, and strikethrough controls are available in the Basic Character Formats pane of the New Character Styles and New
256 Part IV: Text Essentials
Paragraph Styles dialog boxes. The scale, baseline shift, skew, and language controls are in the Advanced Character Formats pane. OpenType controls are in the OpenType Features pane. Custom underline and strikethrough options, covered in Chapter 16, are available in the Underline Options and Strikethrough Options panes, respectively.
You must choose Show Options from the Character panel’s flyout menu to display the Vertical Scale, Horizontal Scale, Baseline Shift, Skew, and Language options in the panel.
The Control panel has the same functions as the Character panel, except the all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, underline, and strikethrough options are in the panel itself rather than in its flyout menu. Figure 15-2 shows the various effects in action. In its top row, InDesign has a different font style applied, incredible has been scaled horizontally, and control is in all caps, while over has had each letter’s baseline shifted by a different amount. In the middle row, the word text has been skewed, the word with is in small caps, a gradient and underline are applied to typographic, a custom underline has been applied to capabilities, and the word formatting has been vertically scaled. In the bottom row, compare the baseline shifts in the top row to the true superscript and subscript following the words most and people. The word never has a custom strikethrough applied, while even uses a standard one. The word heard has a colored stroke applied and a fill of white.
Figure 15-2:
Various
character
formatting
options
applied to
text.
Horizontal Scale and Vertical
Scale options
InDesign’s Horizontal Scale option lets you condense and expand type by squeezing or stretching characters. Similarly, the Vertical Scale option lets you shrink or stretch type vertically.
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Typographers tend to agree that you should avoid excessive scaling. If you need to make text bigger or smaller, your best bet is to adjust font size; if you need to squeeze or stretch a range of text a bit, use InDesign’s kerning and tracking controls because the letter forms aren’t modified — only the space between letters changes when you kern or track text. (For more on this topic, see the upcoming section “Controlling Space between Characters and Lines.”)
Unscaled text has a horizontal and vertical scale value of 100 percent. You can apply scaling values between 1 percent and 1,000 percent. If you apply equal horizontal and vertical scale values, you’re making the original text proportionally larger or smaller. In this case, changing font size is a simpler solution.
To change the scale of highlighted text, enter new values in the Horizontal and/or Vertical Scale fields in the Character panel or Control panel. If a value is highlighted in the Horizontal Scale or Vertical Scale field, you can also use the up and down arrow keys to increase and decrease the scaling in 1-percent increments; press Shift to increase or decrease in 10-percent increments.
Baseline shift
The baseline is an invisible horizontal line on which a line of characters rests. The bottom of each letter sits on the baseline (except descenders, such as in y, p, q, j, and g). When you perform a baseline shift, you move highlighted text above or below its baseline. This feature is useful for carefully placing such characters as trademark and copyright symbols and for creating custom fractions.
To baseline-shift highlighted text, enter new values in the Baseline Shift field in the Character panel or Control panel. You can also use the up and down arrow keys to increase the baseline shift in 1-point increments or press Shift with the arrow keys to increase or decrease it in 10-point increments. Skew (false italic)
For fonts that don’t have an italic type style, InDesign provides the option to skew, or slant, text to create an artificial italic variation of any font. Like horizontal and vertical text scaling, skewing is a clunky way of creating italiclooking text. Use this feature to create special typographic effects, as shown in Figure 15-3, or in situations where a true italic style isn’t available.
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Skewing works better for sans-serif typefaces than for serif typefaces because the characters are simpler and have fewer embellishments that can get oddly distorted when skewed.
To skew highlighted text, you have three options:
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Enter an angle value between –85 and 85 in the Skew field in the Character panel or Control panel. Positive values slant text to the left; negative values slant text to the right.
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Press the accompanying up/down arrow keys when the cursor is in the Skew field to skew text in 1-degree increments. Pressing the Shift key with an arrow key changes the increment 4 degrees.
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Skew all the text in a text frame using the Shear tool or by changing the value in the Shear X Angle field in the Control panel after selecting the frame. Slanting text by shearing a text frame doesn’t affect the skew angle of the text. You can specify a skew angle for highlighted text independently from the frame’s shear angle.
Figure 15-3:
Characters
in skewed
text can
slant
forward, like
italics, or
backward,
as in this
example.
Capitalization options
When you choose All Caps, the uppercase version of all highlighted characters is used: Lowercase letters are converted to uppercase, and uppercase letters remain unchanged.
Similarly, the Small Caps option affects just lowercase letters. When you choose Small Caps, InDesign automatically uses the Small Caps font style if one is available for the font family. (Few font families include this style.) If a Small Caps type style isn’t available, InDesign generates small caps from uppercase letters using the scale percentage specified in the Advanced Type Chapter 15: Finessing Character Details
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pane of the Preferences dialog box. (Choose InDesign➪Preferences➪
Advanced Type [Ô+K] on the Mac or Edit➪Preferences➪Advanced Type
[Ctrl+K] in Windows). The default scale value used to generate small caps text is 70% (of uppercase letters).
Another handy way to change the case of text is to highlight the text, choose Type➪Change Case, and then select from the appropriate submenu option: Uppercase, Lowercase, Title Case, and Sentence Case. Title Case capitalizes the first letter in each word, whereas Sentence Case capitalizes the first letter in the beginning of each sentence.
Superscript and Subscript
When you apply the Superscript and Subscript character formats to highlighted text, InDesign applies a baseline shift to the characters, lifting them above (for superscript) or lowering them below (for subscript) their baseline, and reduces their size.
The amount of baseline shift and scaling that’s used for the Superscript and Subscript formats is determined by the Position and Size fields in the Advanced Type pane of the Preferences dialog box. (Choose InDesign➪Preferences➪Advanced Type [Ô+K] on the Mac or choose Edit➪
Preferences➪Advanced Type [Ctrl+K] in Windows). The default Position value for both formats is 33.3%, which means that characters are moved up or down by one-third of the applied leading value. The default Superscript and Subscript Size value is 58.3%, which means that superscripted and subscripted characters are reduced to 58.3% of the applied font size. The Advanced Type pane lets you specify separate default settings for Superscript and Subscript.
To apply the Superscript or Subscript format to highlighted text, choose the appropriate option from the Character panel’s flyout menu.
Underline and Strikethrough
Underline and Strikethrough formats are typographically considered to be unacceptable for indicating emphasis in text, which is better accomplished by using bold and/or italic font styles.
Underlines can be useful in kickers and other text above a headline, as well as in documents formatted to look as if they’re typewritten. Strikethrough can be used in cases where you want to indicate incorrect answers, eliminated choices, or deleted text.
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If you use underlines and strikethrough, InDesign lets you specify exactly how they look through the Underline Options and Strikethrough Options dialog boxes available in the flyout menus of the Character panel and Control panel.
InDesign lets you create your own underlines and strikethroughs, in addition to using the standard ones, as Chapter 16 explains.
Ligatures
A ligature is a special character that combines two letters. Most fonts include just two ligatures — fi and fl. When you choose the Ligature option, InDesign automatically displays and prints a font’s built-in ligatures — instead of the two component letters — if the font includes ligatures.
One nice thing about the Ligature option is that even though a ligature looks like a single character on-screen, it’s still fully editable. That is, you can click between the two-letter shapes and insert text, if necessary. Also, a ligature created with the Ligature option doesn’t cause InDesign’s spell checker to flag the word that contains it.
To use ligatures within highlighted text, choose Ligatures from the Character panel’s or Control panel’s flyout menu. (Ligatures is set to On by default.) Figure 15-4 shows an example of text with a ligature.
You can also insert ligatures manually:
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On the Mac, press Option+Shift+5 to insert the fi ligature and Option+Shift+6 to insert the fl ligature. You can also use the Mac OS
X’s Character Palette utility or InDesign’s Glyphs panel (Type➪Glyphs
[Option+Shift+F11 or Alt+Shift+F11]) to choose them visually.
Figure 15-4:
Ligatures
are used
between
the fi and fl
letter pairs
in the words
finally and
float at left
but not at
right.
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In Windows, you have to use a program such as the Character Map utility that comes with Windows. Choose Start➪All Programs➪
Accessories➪System Tools➪Character Map; if you have the Classic Start menu interface enabled, choose Start➪Programs➪Accessories➪System Tools➪Character Map.
However, if you do enter ligatures yourself, InDesign’s spell checker flags any words that contain them. For this reason, you’ll typically want InDesign to handle the task of inserting ligatures automatically.
Turning off hyphenation and other breaks
You can prevent individual words from being hyphenated or a string of words from being broken at the end of a line. For example, you may decide that you don’t want to hyphenate certain product names, such as InDesign . The No Break option was created for situations such as these.
To prevent a word or a text string from being broken, highlight it and then choose No Break from the Character panel’s flyout menu or the Control panel’s flyout menu. You can also prevent a word from being hyphenated by placing a discretionary hyphen (Shift+Ô+–or Ctrl+Shift+–) in front of the first letter. (See Chapter 14 for more on hyphenation controls.) Controlling Space between
Characters and Lines
The legibility of a block of text depends as much on the space around it —
called white space — as it does on the readability of the font. InDesign offers two ways to adjust the space between characters:
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Kerning is the adjustment of space between a pair of characters. Most fonts include built-in kerning tables that control the space between character pairs, such as LA, Yo, and WA, that otherwise may appear to have a space between them even when there isn’t one. For large font sizes —
for example, a magazine headline — you may want to manually adjust the space between certain character pairs to achieve consistent spacing. ߜ
Tracking is the process of adding or removing space among all letters in a range of text.
You can apply kerning and/or tracking to highlighted text in 1/1,000-em increments, called units. An em is as wide as the height of the current font size (that is, an em for 12-point text is 12 points wide), which means that kerning and tracking increments are relative to the applied font size. 262 Part IV: Text Essentials
Leading (rhymes with sledding) controls the vertical space between lines of type. It’s traditionally an attribute of paragraphs, but InDesign lets you apply leading on a character-by-character basis. To override the character-oriented approach, ensuring that leading changes affect entire paragraphs, check the Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs option in the Type pane of the Preferences dialog box. (Choose InDesign➪Preferences➪Type [Ô+K] on the Mac or Edit➪Preferences➪Type [Ctrl+K] in Windows.)
Kerning
The Kerning controls in the Character panel and Control panel provide three options for kerning letter pairs:
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Metrics: Controls the space between character pairs in the highlighted text using a font’s built-in kerning pairs.
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Optical: Evaluates each letter pair in highlighted text and adds or removes space between the letters based on the shapes of the
characters.
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Manual: Adds or removes space between a specific letter pair in userspecified amounts. When the flashing text cursor is between a pair of characters, the Kerning field displays the pair’s kerning value. If Metrics or Optical kerning is applied, the kerning value is displayed in parentheses.
To apply Metrics or Optical kerning to highlighted text, choose the appropriate option from the Kerning pop-up menu. To apply manual kerning, click between a pair of letters and then enter a value in the Kerning field or choose one of the predefined values. Negative values tighten; positive values loosen.
When letter shapes start to collide, you’ve tightened too far. Tracking
Tracking is uniform kerning applied to a range of text. (For more on kerning, see the preceding section.) You can use tracking to tighten character spacing for a font that you think is too spacey or loosen spacing for a font that’s too tight. Or you can track a paragraph tighter or looser to eliminate a short last line or a widow (the last line of a paragraph that falls at the top of a page or column).
To apply tracking to highlighted text, enter a value in the Character panel’s or Control panel’s Tracking field or choose one of the predefined values. Negative values tighten; positive values loosen (in 0.001-em increments). Chapter 15: Finessing Character Details
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You may wonder how tracking is different than kerning. They’re essentially the same thing, with this difference: Tracking applies to a selection of three or more characters, whereas kerning is meant to adjust the spacing between just two characters. You use tracking to change the overall tightness of character spacing; you use kerning to improve the spacing between letters that just don’t quite look right compared to the rest of the text.
Leading
Leading (rhymes with sledding, not heeding) refers to the vertical space between lines of type as measured from baseline to baseline. Leading in InDesign is a character-level format, which means that you can apply different leading values within a single paragraph. InDesign looks at each line of text in a paragraph and uses the largest applied leading value within a line to determine the leading for that line.
By default, InDesign applies Auto Leading to text, which is equal to 120
percent of the type size. As long as you don’t change fonts or type sizes in a paragraph, Auto Leading works pretty well. But if you do change fonts or sizes, Auto Leading can result in inconsistent spacing between lines. For this reason, specifying an actual leading value is safer.
In most cases, using a leading value that is slightly larger than the type size is a good idea. When the leading value equals the type size, text is said to be set solid. That’s about as tight as you ever want to set leading, unless you’re trying to achieve a special typographic effect or working with very large text sizes in ad-copy headlines. As is the case with kerning and tracking, when tight leading causes letters to collide — ascenders and descenders are the first to overlap — you’ve gone too far.
You can change InDesign’s preset Auto Leading value of 120%. To do so, choose Type➪Paragraph (Option+Ô+T or Ctrl+Alt+T) to display the Paragraph panel. Choose Justification in the flyout menu, enter a new value in the Auto Leading field, and then click OK. (Why a character format setting is accessed via the Paragraph panel and what Auto Leading has to do with Justification are both mysteries.)
To modify the leading value applied to selected text, choose one of the predefined options from the Leading pop-up menu in the Character panel or Control panel or enter a leading value in the field. You can enter values from 0 to 5,000 points in 0.001-point increments. You can also use the up and down arrow keys to change leading in 1-point increments.
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