Using Special Text Characters

Text does not consist of just alphabetical characters. There are special characters and spaces that are used as part of professional typography. InDesign lets you insert those characters into your documents.

Tip

See the next page for a list of the special characters and white space characters and their default keyboard shortcuts.

To insert special characters:

1.	Place the insertion point where you want to insert the special character.
2.	Choose Type > Insert Special Character. or Control-click (Mac) or right-mouse click (Win) and choose Insert Special Character from the contextual menu.
3.	Choose a character listing from the submenu.

You can insert white space characters, which are fixed spaces such as em and en spaces. You can also insert a nonbreaking space that forces two words to stay together.

To insert special space characters:

1.	Place the insertion point where you want to insert the special character. Tip You can highlight a regular space to replace it with a white space character.
2.	Choose Type > Insert White Space. or Control-click (Mac) or right-mouse click (Win) and choose Insert White Space from the contextual menu.
3.	Choose a white space character listing from the submenu.

How Wide are the Spaces?

While some of the white space character widths are obvious, others need some definition.

• An em space is the size of the letter M at that point size. In traditional typesetting, an em space was often used as the indent for a paragraph.

• An en space is one-half of an em space. An en space is often used as a fixed-width space between bullets and the next character of text.

• A thin space is one-eighth of an em space. I use a thin space on either side of an em dash or the greater than (>) sign in menu commands such as File > New.

• A hair space is one-twenty-fourth of an em space. A hair space is used when extremely small spaces are needed.

• A figure space is the width of a number in the same typeface. This is used to help align numbers in financial tables.

• A punctuation space is the width of a period or comma.

• A flush space is a variable space that is used with the Justify All paragraph alignment setting. When flush space is inserted, the space between the characters will automatically expand so that the line of text fills the entire column width. A flush space character ensures that the justification of the text comes from the word spacing and not letterspacing.