Working with Character Formats

Before you begin looking at InDesign's character formatting features, you should be clear about a fundamental InDesign type-formatting concept: Using separate tools, InDesign lets you modify the appearance of highlighted characters or selected paragraphs:

• When characters are highlighted (or the text cursor is flashing), you can use the Character pane (Type ‚ Character, or z +T or Ctrl+T), shown in Figure 17-1, to change their appearance in several ways. If you choose Hide Options from the palette menu, the Vertical Scale, Horizontal Scale, Baseline Shift, and Skew fields and the Language pop-up menu are not displayed.

  
  Figure 17-1: The Character pane with all options shown.

• When paragraphs are selected, the Paragraph pane (Type ‚ Paragraph, or Option+ z +T or Ctrl+Alt+T) lets you change how the paragraphs are constructed . (For more information about the Paragraph pane, see Chapter 18.)

The Character pane provides access to most of InDesign's character formatting options. Three of the options ‚ Font Family, Type Style, and Size ‚ are also available in the Type menu, and several options have keyboard shortcuts. The new Control palette offers all the formatting options of the Character pane plus others, as shown in Figure 17-2. (If the Control palette doesn't show the character formatting options shown in the figure, be sure to select text and click the A icon on the palette.)

Figure 17-2: The character formatting options in the new Control palette.

Note ‚  

In InDesign (like most programs), you can select only contiguous text. So if you have, for example, several subheads you want to apply a font to, you can't select them all and apply the formatting in one fell swoop. You'll have to do each text segment separately.

Tip ‚  

If the Type tool is selected and no objects are active, the controls in the Character pane are still available. In this situation, any changes you make in the Character pane become the default settings for the document and are automatically used when you create new text frames . If you change character formats when the cursor is flashing and no text is selected, your changes are applied at the insertion point. When you begin typing, you'll see the results of your changes.

InDesign lets you apply character formats to highlighted text in two ways: You can

• Use the controls in the Character pane or their keyboard shortcuts.

• Create and apply character-level style sheets.

Either way, you can apply the same formatting. The difference is that a character style sheet's settings are stored, so you can apply the exact same settings easily to other text. Plus, if you change a character style sheet's settings, any text based on it is automatically changed to reflect the new settings.

If you are working on a simple, one-page publication, such as a business card, a poster, or an ad, you'll probably use the Character pane to format the text elements. However, if you're producing a multipage publication ‚ a newsletter, magazine, catalog, or newspaper, for example ‚ you should take advantage of style sheets. Using them will save you time and make your job a whole lot easier.

Cross-Reference ‚  

For details about creating and applying character and paragraph style sheets, see Chapter 20.

Even if you do use style sheets for a particular publication, you'll probably also do some local formatting. For example, you would probably use the Character pane to format the type on the opening spread of a feature magazine article, and then use style sheets to quickly format the remainder of the article.

Cross-Reference ‚  

Some of the controls in the Transform pane let you change the appearance of all the text within a text frame. For more information about the Transform pane, see Chapter 11.

Tip ‚  

You can change the default character formats associated with the Type tool by making changes in the Character pane when no text is selected or the text-insertion cursor isn't flashing.