Leaving Space between Characters and Lines


Leaving Space between Characters and Lines

Typographers often pay as much attention to the space between characters, words, and lines of text as they do to the appearance of the characters themselves . Their concern about space is well justified. 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:

  • Kerning: Kerning is the adjustment of space between a pair of characters. Most fonts include built-in kerning tables that control the space between pesky character pairs, such as LA , Yo , and WA , that otherwise could appear to have a space between them even when there isn't one. Particularly at small font sizes, it's safe to use a font's built-in kerning information to control the space between letter pairs. But for large font sizes, for example the front-page nameplate of a newsletter or a magazine headline, you may want to manually adjust the space between certain character pairs to achieve consistent spacing.

  • Tracking: Tracking is similar to kerning but applies to a range of highlighted text. Tracking is the process of adding or removing space among all letters in a range of text.

InDesign lets you 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 .

InDesign's Leading (rhymes with sledding, not with pleading ) feature lets you control the vertical space between lines of type. It's traditionally an attribute of paragraphs, but InDesign lets you apply it 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 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).

Cross-Reference ‚  

Chapter 18 explains how to control the spacing between words, which is part of paragraph formatting.

QuarkXPress User ‚  

InDesign users, especially QuarkXPress converts, may be surprised at the seemingly large kerning and tracking values produced by all the program's kerning and tracking methods . Keep in mind that InDesign lets you adjust space in 0.001-em units ( 1 / 1,000 of an em). In QuarkXPress, for example, the kerning unit is 0.005 em ( 1 / 200 of an em). So QuarkXPress users should not be surprised to see kerning and tracking values that are 10 to 20 times greater than you're used to ‚ you're working with multiples of finer increments.

Kerning

The Kerning controls in the Character pane and Control palette provide three options for kerning letter pairs: Metrics kerning, Optical kerning, and manual kerning:

  • Metrics kerning uses a font's built-in kerning pairs to control the space between character pairs in the highlighted text.

  • Optical kerning has InDesign "look" at each letter pair in highlighted text and add or remove space between the letters based on the shapes of the characters.

  • Manual kerning is adding or removing space between a specific letter pair in user-specified amounts.

The kerning method you use will depend on the circumstances. For example, some fonts include a large set of kerning pairs. Such fonts, especially at text font sizes (9 to 12 points) and lower, may look fine using the default Metrics kerning option, which uses built-in kerning pairs. On the other hand, if the font applied to highlighted text has few or no built-in kerning pairs or if several different fonts are mixed together, the text may benefit from the Optical kerning method. At display type sizes (36 points and larger) you may want to manually kern individual letter pairs to suit your taste.

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, then enter a value in the Kerning field or choose one of the predefined values. Negative values tighten; positive values loosen.

Tip ‚  

You can also use a keyboard shortcut to apply manual kerning. Press Option+left cursor or Alt+left cursor to decrease the kerning value in increments of 20 units; Press Option+right cursor or Alt+right cursor to increase the kerning value in increments of 20 units. If you add the z or Ctrl keys to these keyboard shortcuts, the increment is increased to 100 units. If you use the up and down cursor keys in the Kerning field in the Character pane or Control palette, you change the kerning in increments of 10, while holding the Shift key changes the increments to 25.

Caution ‚  

A warning about kerning and tracking: InDesign will happily let you tighten or loosen text to the point of illegibility. If this is the effect you're after, go for it. But as a general rule, when letter shapes start to collide, you've tightened too far.

Tracking

If you understand kerning, you can think of tracking as uniform kerning applied to a range of text. You might 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 could 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 pane's Tracking field or choose one of the predefined values. Negative values tighten; positive values loosen (in 0.001-em increments). Use the same keyboard techniques as for kerning.

Leading

In the days of metal type, typesetters would insert thin strips of metal ‚ specifically , lead ‚ between rows of letters to aid legibility. In the world of digital typography, leading 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 separately 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.

QuarkXPress User ‚  

Leading as a character format is a carryover from PageMaker (and not necessarily a good one). QuarkXPress users may find InDesign's leading method to be odd at first because leading is a paragraph-level format in that program. In most cases, you'll apply a single leading value to entire paragraphs, in which case leading behaves like a paragraph-level format.

By default, InDesign applies Auto Leading to text. When Auto Leading is applied, leading is equal to 120 percent of the font size. For example, if Auto Leading is applied to 10-point text, the leading value is 12 points; for 12-point text, Auto Leading is 14.4 points; and so on. As long as you don't change fonts or font 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, it's safer to specify an actual leading value.

Generally, it's a good idea to use a leading value that is slightly larger than the font size, which is why Auto Leading works in many cases. When the leading value equals the font size, text is said to be set solid. That's about as tight as you'll 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.

Tip ‚  

You can change InDesign's preset Auto Leading value of 120%. To do so, choose Type Paragraph, or Option+ z +T or Ctrl+Alt+T, to display the Paragraph pane. Choose Justification in the palette menu, enter a new value in the Auto Leading field, and then click OK. (Why a character format setting is accessed via the Paragraph pane and what Auto Leading has to do with Justification are both mysteries.)

QuarkXPress User ‚  

Another mystery is why you cannot specify Auto Leading amounts in anything other than percentages. This will cause many QuarkXPress documents imported into InDesign to flow incorrectly, because QuarkXPress lets you set the Auto Leading to a specific value, such as +2 (which adds 2 points to the text size rather than use a percentage like 120 percent that results in awkward leading amounts like 14.4 points). Being able to specify a specific additive value like +2 makes sense for many kinds of layouts, so the inability to specify such values is an unfortunate continued omission in InDesign.

One thing QuarkXPress users can do to make InDesign work more like QuarkXPress's standard approach to leading is to ensure that Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs is checked in the Text pane of the Preferences dialog box (InDesign Preferences on the Mac or Edit Preferences in Windows, or z +K or Ctrl+K).

To modify the leading value applied to selected text, choose one of the predefined options from the Leading pop-up menu in the Character pane or Control palette, 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 cursor keys to change leading in 1-point increments.




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

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