Changing Font Family, Type Style, and Size

These days, the terms font, face, typeface, font family, and type style are often used interchangeably. When you're talking with friends or colleagues about typography, it doesn't matter which term you use as long as you make yourself understood , but if you're going to be setting type with InDesign, you should be familiar with the font- related terms you'll find in the menus and panes.

The term font, or typeface, usually refers to 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 Plain, Arial Bold, Adobe Garamond Semibold Italic, and ITC New Baskerville Italic are well-known fonts. A font family is a collection of several fonts that share the same general appearance but differ in stroke width, weight, and/or stroke angle. Some examples of font families are Adobe Caslon, Berthold Baskerville, Times New Roman, and Tekton.

In InDesign each of the fonts that make up a font family is referred to as a typestyle. For example, the Times Europa font family is made up of four typestyles: Roman, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic, as shown in Figure 17-3. When you choose a font family from the Character pane's Font menu, InDesign displays the family's typestyle variations in the accompanying Type Styles pop-up menu.

Figure 17-3: The Times Europa font family includes four typestyles ‚ Roman, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic ‚ as shown here.

Unlike most word processing and desktop-publishing programs, InDesign doesn't include built-in shadow and outline styles. (These styles are available only if a font includes them.) Most programs create these stylistic variations artificially by modifying plain characters. If you want to create outline text, you can use the Stroke pane (Window ‚ Stroke, or F10) to apply a stroke. If you want to create a drop shadow for text, you can stack and offset two text frames .

Cross-Reference ‚

For more on the Stroke pane and other text-as-art techniques, see Chapter 28. For more on creating special typographic effects, see Chapter 19.

Similarly, bold and italic variations are available only for font families that include these typestyles. This prevents you from applying, for example, italic to Trajan, a font family that doesn't include an italic variation. (InDesign does let you create false italics by skewing text, which is covered later in this chapter. However, you should avoid such heavy-handed shape twisting unless it's absolutely necessary.)

Changing font family and type style

When you change from one font to another in InDesign, you can choose a new font family and typestyle independently in the Character pane. For example, changing from Arial Bold to Times Bold or from Arial Regular to Berthold Baskerville Regular is a simple change of font family. However, if you switch from Bookman Light to Century Schoolbook Bold Italic, you're changing both family and typestyle.

New Feature ‚

InDesign CS will sometimes display a font name multiple times in various panes and dialog boxes, such as the Character pane. This occurs if you have multiple versions of a font on your computer ‚ say, both a TrueType and PostScript version of Helvetica. (Earlier versions of InDesign would show only one of these fonts, making the others inaccessible.) You can tell which is which by the code that InDesign appends to the font name : (TT) for TrueType, (T1) for PostScript Type 1, and (OTF) for OpenType. You really shouldn't have multiple versions of a font on your computer, since different versions can look and be spaced differently resulting in inconsistent appearance that's hard to fix. If you notice such multiple versions because InDesign calls them to your attention, delete or deactivate the unneeded fonts (typically, you would keep the PostScript version, or OpenType if supported by your service bureau ).

Using the Character pane

The Character pane offers two methods for changing the font family applied to highlighted text. You can

Click on the Font Family menu, then choose a name from the list of available font families.
Click in front of or highlight the font name displayed in the Font Family field, type in the first few letters of the font family you want to apply, then click Return or Enter. For example, entering Ari will select Arial (if it's available on your computer).

When you change the font family applied to selected text, InDesign will try to maintain the applied typestyle. If, for example, you switch from Adobe Garamond Bold Italic to Adobe Caslon, InDesign will automatically use Adobe Caslon Bold Italic, which is one of several typestyles that make up this font family. But if you switch from Arial Bold Italic to Avant Garde, which doesn't include a bold italic variation, Avant Garde Book will be used instead.

Using the Control palette and Font submenu

If you use the Control palette, you first select the font family with the Font pop-up menu, then select a typestyle from a submenu, as Figure 17-4 shows. If a font family doesn't have typestyle variations, it will have no submenu. Similarly, you can also change the font family by choosing Type ‚ Font then selecting a name in the Font submenu.

Figure 17-4: To select a typestyle from the Control palette, first choose the font family from the Font pop-up menu, then choose a typestyle from the selected font's submenu.

In either case, if a particular font family includes a submenu with typestyle variations, you must also choose a type style. If you choose only a font family when typestyles are available in an accompanying submenu, no changes are applied to the selected text.

One advantage of using the Control palette or Font submenu instead of the Character pane is that you can reliably change the font family and the typestyle at the same time. If a corresponding typestyle does not exist when you change the font family via the Character pane, the base style (such as plain, book, or regular) of the new family is used. In this case, the Character pane's Type Style menu confusingly displays the name of the original typestyle in brackets.

Changing font size

InDesign lets you specify font sizes from 0.1 point to 1,296 points (108 inches) in increments as fine as 0.001 point. Of course, even if it were possible to clearly print type as small as a thousandth of a point (that is, ¹ / _72,000 of an inch), which is beyond the capabilities of most printers, nobody could read it without a microscope anyway.

Use good judgment when choosing font 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.

InDesign offers several methods for changing the font size of highlighted text. You can

Use one of several techniques in the Character pane and Control palette:
- Choose one of the predefined sizes from the Size menu in the Character pane or Control palette.
- Highlight the currently applied font size displayed in the accompanying editable field, enter a new size, then press Return or Enter.
- Use the up and down cursor keys to increase or decrease the size in 1-point increments. Holding Shift multiplies the increment to 10.
Choose Type ‚ Size, then choose one of the predefined sizes listed in the Size submenu. If you choose Other from the submenu, the Size field is highlighted in the Character pane. Enter a custom size, then press Return or Enter.
Control+click or right-click a text selection, then choose a size from the Size submenu. If you choose Other from the submenu, the Font Size field is highlighted in the Character pane. Enter a custom size, then press Return or Enter.

Use keyboard commands to adjust text size:

Press Shift+ z +> or Ctrl+Shift+> to enlarge highlighted text in 2-point increments. (You can set a different increment in the Units & Measurements pane in the Preferences dialog box, accessed by choosing InDesign ‚ Preferences on the Mac or Edit ‚ Preferences in Windows, or by pressing z +K or Ctrl+K.)
Press Shift+ z +< or Ctrl+Shift+< to reduce highlighted text.
Press Option+Shift+ z +> or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+> to increase the text size in 10-point increments.
Press Option+Shift+ z +< or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+< to decrease the text size in 10-point increments.

New Feature ‚

InDesign CS fixes a flaw in earlier versions. Before, if you changed the size of a text box via the Transform pane, InDesign adjusted the text size accordingly on-screen but still reported the original text size in the Character pane and other character formatting tools. Now, InDesign changes the reported text size to match its new, actual size after the text box has been resized.

Note ‚

If text is highlighted and the Size field is empty, it means that more than one font size is used in the selected text.