Applying Other Character Formats


Font family, typestyle, and font size are the most commonly modified character formats, but the Character pane and Control palette contain several other controls for managing the appearance of type. Some of these controls are displayed in the pane window; others are available in the pane's pop-up menu. The Control palette offers more formatting options than the Character pane.

In the Control palette, you can adjust all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, underline, strikethrough, kerning, tracking, horizontal and vertical scale, baseline shift, skew, character style, and language. Through the palette menu, you can also set ligatures, modify underline and strikethrough settings, control whether text may break (be hyphenated), and select OpenType features. Figure 17-5 shows the palette menu for the Control palette's character formatting.


Figure 17-5: The palette menu for the Control palette's character formatting view.

In the Character pane, you can adjust kerning, tracking, horizontal and vertical scale, baseline shift, skew, and language. Through the palette menu, 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.

Note ‚  

You must choose Show Options from the Character pane's pop-up menu to display the Vertical Scale, Horizontal Scale, Baseline Shift, Skew, and Language options.

Figure 17-6 shows the various effects in action.


Figure 17-6: Various character formatting options applied to text. Top row: can has been scaled horizontally, and do vertically, while all has had each letter's baseline shifted by a different amount. Compare that to the true superscript and subscript following the word sorts. Middle row: The word things has been skewed, while the word with is in real italics; notice how different the letters h, i, and t differ .

Horizontal Scale and Vertical Scale

Some font families include condensed (that is, slightly squeezed) and/or expanded (slightly stretched ) stylistic variations, but most don't. InDesign's Horizontal Scale option lets you create artificially condensed and expanded type by squeezing or stretching characters . Similarly, the Vertical Scale option lets you shrink or stretch type vertically.

Among typographers, there are two schools of thought about scaling type. One camp contends that such distortions of letterforms are taboo and should be avoided. The other side contends that a small amount of scaling doesn't adversely affect the original font and is acceptable. There's general agreement that overscaling should be avoided. For the most part, if you need to make text bigger or smaller, you should adjust font size; if you need to squeeze or stretch a range of text a bit, it's better to use InDesign's kerning and tracking controls (covered later in this chapter) because the letterforms are not affected. Only the space between letters changes when you kern or track text.

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. Keep in mind that when you scale text, you are not changing the font size. For example, 24-point type scaled vertically to 200 percent is 48 points tall, but its font size is still 24 points.

To change the scale of highlighted text, enter new values in the Horizontal and/or Vertical Scale fields in the Character pane or Control palette. If a value is highlighted in the Horizontal Scale or Vertical Scale field, you can also use the up and down cursor keys to increase and decrease the scaling in 1 percent increments; hold 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 (except descenders, such as in y, p, q, j, and g ) sits on the baseline. InDesign's Baseline Shift feature lets 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. (Unlike superscripts and subscripts, text whose baseline has shifted does not change size.)

To baseline-shift highlighted text, enter new values in the Baseline Shift field in the Character pane or Control palette. You can also use the up and down cursor keys to increase the baseline shift in 1-point increments, or hold Shift when using the cursor keys to increase or decrease it in 10-point increments.

Skew (false italic)

For fonts that don't have an italic typestyle, InDesign provides the option to skew, or slant, text to create an artificial italic variation of any font. (You can also use it with fonts that have a natural italic; refer to Figure 17-6.) Like horizontal and vertical text scaling, skewing is a clunky way of creating italic-looking text. Use this feature to create special typographic effects, such as the shadow text shown in Figure 17-7, or in situations where a true italic style is not available.


Figure 17-7: Skewing and shading a copy of the black text created the backlit shadow effect.
Note ‚  

Skewing as a form of italics typically works better for sans-serif typefaces than for serif typefaces , since the characters are simpler and have fewer embellishments that can get oddly distorted when skewed.

To skew highlighted text, you have two options:

  • Enter an angle value between ‚ 85 and 85 in the Skew field in the Character pane or Control palette. Positive values slant text to the left; negative values slant text to the right.

  • Click the accompanying up/down cursors when the cursor is in the Skew field to skew text in 1-degree increments. Holding down the Shift key while clicking the cursors changes the increment to 4 degrees.

    Tip ‚  

    You can also 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 Transform pane. Slanting text by shearing a text frame does not affect the skew angle of the text. You can specify a skew angle for highlighted text independently from the frame's shear angle.

Language

The ability to correctly hyphenate and check the spelling of text in several languages is one of InDesign's most powerful features. The program uses dictionaries to accomplish these tasks . These dictionaries, each of which contains several hundred thousand words, also let you specify a different language for text on a character-by-character basis, although chances are that a single word will be the smallest text unit to which you will apply a separate language.

For example, an article about Spanish cooking might include the word alb ƒ ²ndigas (the Spanish term for meatballs). By applying the Spanish: Castilian language to this word, as shown in Figure 17-8, InDesign will not flag it when you check spelling. However, if you were to apply U.S. English to alb ƒ ²ndigas, it would show up as a misspelled word (unless you had added it to your dictionary; see the Tip that follows ).


Figure 17-8: By applying the Spanish: Castilian language to alb ƒ ²ndigas, as shown here, InDesign will use the associated dictionary when checking the spelling of this word.

To assign a different language to highlighted text, choose the appropriate language from the Language menu in the Control palette or from the Character pane's palette menu, as shown in Figure 17-8.

Tip ‚  

If you discover any correctly spelled words that are not included in a particular language dictionary, you can add the words to the dictionary. Choose Edit Dictionary and choose the appropriate dictionary in the Language pop-up menu to customize any dictionary.

QuarkXPress User ‚  

The Passport edition of QuarkXPress has a similar feature to specify the hyphenation and spelling language, but not the standard version of QuarkXPress.

All Caps and Small Caps

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 will automatically use the Small Caps typestyle if one is available for the font family applied to the highlighted text (few font families include this style). If a Small Caps typestyle is not available, InDesign generates small caps from uppercase letters using the scale percentage specified in the Text pane of the Preferences dialog box (choose InDesign Preferences on the Mac or Edit Preferences in Windows, or press z +K or Ctrl+K). The default scale value used to generate small caps text is 70% (of uppercase letters).

Tip ‚  

You should never enter text in all capital letters, even if you think you want all caps. If you enter lowercase letters, you can easily change them to uppercase by applying the All Caps format, but if you enter uppercase letters, you can't change them to lowercase or to small caps without retyping them.

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 Text pane of the Preferences dialog box (choose InDesign Preferences on the Mac or Edit Preferences in Windows, or press z +K or Ctrl+K). 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 Text Preferences pane lets you specify separate default settings for Superscript and Subscript.

Tip ‚  

For most newspaper and magazine work, I prefer a size of 65% for superscripts and subscripts, as well as a position of 30% for subscripts and 35% for superscripts. These values work better than the InDesign defaults in the small text sizes and tight leading of such publications . If you change these settings when no document is open , they become the default for all future new documents.

You can use the Superscript and Subscript formats to create, for example, custom fractions or numbers for footnotes or to reposition special characters such as asterisks . To apply the Superscript or Subscript format to highlighted text, choose the appropriate option from the Character pane's pop-up menu. Figure 17-6 shows examples of text to which the default Superscript and Subscript settings have been applied.

Underline and Strikethrough

The Underline and Strikethrough formats are holdovers from the days of typewriters and are not typographically acceptable for indicating emphasis in text, which is better accomplished by using bold and/or italic typestyles.

Underlines can be useful in kickers and other text above a headline, as well as in documents formatted to look as if they are typewritten. Strikethrough is rarely useful in a document, though in textbooks and other educational materials, you may want to use it to indicate incorrect answers, eliminated choices, or deleted text (when showing how to edit).

If you do use underlines and strikethrough, InDesign lets you specify exactly how they look through the Underline Options and Strikethrough Options dialog boxes available in the palette menus of the Character pane and Control palette.

Cross-Reference ‚  

Chapter 19 covers these custom underline and strikethrough settings in detail.

Note ‚  

If you don't set a specific size for underlines and strikethroughs, the weight of an underline or strikethrough line is relative to the font size.

Ligatures

A ligature is a special character that combines two letters. Most early typefaces included five ligatures ‚ ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. These days, 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 Ligatures option will not cause InDesign's spell checker to flag the word that contains it.

QuarkXPress User ‚  

Unlike Windows QuarkXPress, InDesign for Windows supports automatic ligatures in Windows fonts that have them.

To use ligatures within highlighted text, choose Ligatures from the Character pane's or Control palette's palette menu (Ligatures is set to On by default). Figure 17-9 shows a before-and-after example of text to which the Ligature option has been applied.


Figure 17-9: Ligatures are used in the top two lines but not in the bottom two. Notice the difference in space between the fi and fl letter pairs in finally and float.

For most Mac fonts that include ligatures, pressing Option+Shift+5 will insert the ? ligature, while Option+Shift+6 inserts the ? ligature. In Windows, you'll have to use the Alt code (hold the Alt key and press the character's four-digit code from the numeric keypad) or a program like Character Map that comes with Windows to access the ligature characters in fonts that support them. Either way, if you enter ligatures yourself, InDesign's spell checker will flag any words that contain them. For this reason, you may want to let the program handle the task of inserting ligatures.

OpenType options

The OpenType font standard developed by Adobe and Microsoft supports many more character variations than the ones most publishers use. In OpenType, many variations of a character exist in the same font, and you specify which variant you want for highlighted text in the Character pane's or Control palette's palette menu. For example:

  • Perhaps the best known such variation involves numerals, of which there are titling and old-style forms.

  • Another well-known character variant is small caps: Real small caps are designed to have the same weight as a lowercase character, so the strokes are actually thicker than the ones created by scaling down text, such as when you use InDesign's small caps feature.

  • Many OpenType fonts include real fractions, not ones you generate by manipulating the size and position of numbers around a slash or virgule (the shorter version of a slash used in fractions).

Figure 17-10 shows examples of the two kinds of numerals, as well as the OpenType menu for an OpenType font that shows the kinds of variations available:

  • Titling figures, also called modern figures, are much like uppercase letters in that they're all the same size and the bottom of each numeral rests on the baseline. Titling figures are often used within uppercase text.

  • Old-style figures, also called text figures, hanging figures, and lowercase figures, are not uniform in size. In old-style figures, the numerals 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 usually hang below the baseline like descenders in letters such as g and y. Similarly, the numerals 6 and 8 are taller than the others and rise above the x-height like ascenders in letters such as b and l.


Figure 17-10: The top row of numbers uses typical titling figures ‚ all are the same height. The bottom row uses old-style numerals. At right is the OpenType menu for the fonts used here.

For the vast majority of fonts in use today, applying an OpenType feature has no effect, since most fonts in use are standard Type 1 PostScript or TrueType. Among OpenType fonts, there is wide variation in what variations they support; InDesign indicates unavailable options by enclosing them in brackets in the menu, as shown in Figure 17-10.

Note ‚  

There is a type of font called an expert font that includes old-style numerals, fractions, true small caps, and other special characters. It is used as an adjunct to the regular version of the font, letting you manually apply the special characters. For example, if you used Garamond as your font, you could apply Garamond Expert to the numerals to get old-style numerals. This is a lot of work, so most people don't bother except for typographically sophisticated ‚ and short ‚ documents like ads. Unfortunately, InDesign doesn't detect the use of expert fonts and use them to apply OpenType-like attributes such as old-style numerals, true small caps, and true fractions when they are available. Instead, you have to apply them manually.

No Break

InDesign lets you 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 software names , such as InDesign, CorelDraw, or FreeHand. Or perhaps you don't want to separate the J and the P in J. P. Morgan. The No Break option was created for situations such as these.

To prevent a word or a text string from being broken, highlight it, then choose No Break from the Character pane's or Control palette's palette menu.

Caution ‚  

If you apply the No Break option to a range of text that's longer than the width of the current column, InDesign will track the text so that it fits on a single line ‚ squeezing it unacceptably.

Tip ‚  

You can also prevent a word from being hyphenated by placing a discretionary hyphen (Shift+ z +- [hyphen] or Ctrl+Shift+- [hyphen]) in front of the first letter.




Adobe InDesign CS Bible
Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible
ISBN: 0470119381
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 344
Authors: Galen Gruman

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