To complete this chapter, you will need a PC or Mac, with a copy of Adobe InDesign installed. An active internet connection is also recommended, as without it some features will not work. You should be comfortable navigating the InDesign interface as covered in Chapter 1—being able to open and close panels, for example.

When you work within InDesign, everything sits inside a frame. In this recipe, we will look at how to create text frames in InDesign for including type within your documents. You will learn how to add placeholder text (sometimes known as lorem ipsum text), in order to give you some dummy content to work on.

We will then look at how to reposition your text frames, as well as how to resize the frames independently of the text and together with the text.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1.

How to do it…

In order to create text frames, add placeholder text, and then reposition and resize your text frames, follow these steps:

1. Select the Type tool from the toolbar, marked as A in Figure 2.1.
2. With the Type tool selected, simply click and drag (while holding the mousing button down) to create a rectangular shape on the page, at whatever size you stipulate. If you wish to create a perfect square rather than a rectangle, simply hold down the Shift key at the same time, and let go of the mouse before releasing the Shift key:

Figure 2.1: The InDesign toolbar

Tip

If you hold down the space bar during the frame creation process while still holding down the mouse button, you can temporarily move the mouse to reposition the frame. If you then release the space bar, you can continue creating your frame again.

3. When you create a new text frame, the cursor can be seen blinking at the top left of the frame, and if you type on the keyboard, you will see the text appear in the frame; however, we want to generate placeholder text automatically. To automatically generate placeholder text in the frame, either go to the Type menu and select Fill with Placeholder Text or you can right-click on the text frame with the mouse and select Fill with Placeholder text from the pop-up menu that appears.
4. Having created a text frame and added placeholder text you may now wish to reposition the text frame within your document. To do this, you will need to select the Selection tool, marked as B in Figure 2.1. Using this tool, you can now click on the text frame and drag it around within the document to the place you want it. In this instance, we will drag it so that the text frame touches the top and left margins, as shown in Figure 2.2:

Figure 2.2: Repositioning a text frame so that it is aligned with the top and left margins

5. Having repositioned the frame so that it aligns with the top and left margins, we will now resize it so that it also aligns with the bottom and right margins. To resize a text frame, select the frame with the Selection tool, and then move the cursor to hover over the bottom right-hand corner of the frame. As you do this, you should see the cursor change to two little arrows (shown by A in Figure 2.3). When you see the two little arrows, click and hold down the mouse button, then drag the corner of the frame down to align it with the bottom and right-hand margins before releasing the mouse button.

While we have resized the object from the bottom-right corner, it is worth noting that you can resize objects in this way from any of the corners of the object, as well as from halfway through the four sides of the object:

Figure 2.3: A text frame selected and ready to be resized

Occasionally, you might want to quickly insert characters such as copyright symbols or trademark symbols, which can’t always be done easily through the keyboard. Special characters are a way of achieving this quickly and easily; in this recipe, we will show you how.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You will also need to add a text frame containing some text, as shown in the previous Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe.

How to do it…

In order to insert special characters, follow these steps:

1. Place the cursor where you want to apply the special character within your text. I am going to apply a registered trademark symbol after the name of the Highlander company, so I would put the cursor immediately after the company name.
2. Now, go to the Type menu and navigate to the Insert Special Character option. This will open another menu, where you should select Symbols, which in turn expands to show you the different symbol options, as shown in Figure 2.4. Click Registered Trademark Symbol to generate a registered trademark symbol within the text (subject to the current font containing that character within it):

Figure 2.4: Applying special characters such as copyright, trademark, and registered trademark symbols

Note

Special characters also come in useful for generating page numbering, as shown in the Generating page numbers in parent pages recipe, which can be found in Chapter 6, and when creating story jumps, the recipe for which can be found in Chapter 9.

Glyphs are the individual symbols that together make up the content of a font face. They generally represent a single character (although can sometimes represent more than one character—for example, with ligatures), and the InDesign Glyphs panel gives you a useful window through which to both see and access characters that you may not typically find on your keyboard.

One common use of glyphs I encounter is for accessing international character sets—for example, when writing people’s names that contain characters you generally won’t find on a standard British or North American keyboard.

In this recipe, we will look at adding glyphs to your text frames as well as creating reusable glyph sets, which make it quick and easy to find the glyphs you commonly use when you are working.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You will also need to create a text frame containing some text, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe.

How to do it…

In order to use glyphs in your content, follow these steps:

1. Start by opening the Glyphs panel, which can be found under the Window menu under the Type and Tables section.
2. The Glyphs panel is where you can see all the glyphs within the fonts that you have installed. Here, you can switch to different fonts (marked as A in Figure 2.5), and then choose to show the entire font or a particular subset from the dropdown (marked as B in Figure 2.5) such as math symbols or currency symbols.

It is worth noting that if you are trying to find a specific glyph, you can also search by name, Unicode value, or character/glyph ID using the search bar (marked as C in Figure 2.5):

Figure 2.5: The Glyphs panel in InDesign

3. With our cursor in the place where we would like to insert our glyph, double-click on a glyph within the Glyphs panel, and it will be inserted at that position.
4. This allows us to easily insert a single glyph, but you might want to reuse a small group of glyphs on a regular basis, so let’s have a look now at how to do that using glyph sets.
5. A glyph set is a reusable collection of glyphs, and it can be a good time saver when it comes to finding and using glyphs. To create a glyph set, click the Glyphs panel menu icon (marked as D in Figure 2.5) to open the Glyphs panel menu, and then select New Glyph Set. A small pop-up box will appear for creating your new glyph set; here, you can give your set a name and control how new glyphs will be added to the set, with the options being:
   • Insert at Front: Adds them at the top of the glyph set
   • Append at End: Adds them at the end of the glyph set
   • Unicode Order: Inserts them in the order they appear within the font
6. With our glyph set created, we now need to add some glyphs to it. To do this, simply find a glyph you like within the panel and right-click on it with the mouse. You will see a pop-up menu appear (marked as A in Figure 2.6) containing an Add to Glyph Set option, and you can then choose the glyph set you created earlier. Add a few glyphs to your glyph set, such as é, ç, or è, or, if you prefer, choose others:

Figure 2.6: The Glyphs panel menu

7. If you are unable to right-click with the mouse, you can always select a glyph and then add it to the glyph set from the panel menu, marked as D in Figure 2.5.
8. Having created a glyph set and added some glyphs to it, we now need to view the glyph set rather than the whole font. This can be done from the dropdown marked as B in Figure 2.5. To view just the glyphs in your glyph set, scroll to the top of the list in the dropdown and choose your glyph set. To then go back to viewing the whole font—for example, to add more glyphs to the set—select Entire Font.
9. If you decide you want to delete a glyph set, just go to the panel menu and select Delete Glyph Set, then the name of the glyph set you wish to delete:

Figure 2.7: Glyphs panel docked for quick and easy access

Tip

I find keeping the Glyphs panel docked on the right as a small icon (shown in Figure 2.7) can be a quick and easy way to access it without taking up much space at all. Just one click on the icon expands it, and another click hides it again. For more details, see the Opening and repositioning panels recipe in Chapter 1.

Once you have some text on the page, it is important to know how to format it. In this recipe, you will learn how to change the font face, adjust the font size, and alter the spacing between lines (known as leading), as well as change the spacing between characters (known as kerning and tracking).

We will also learn a few hidden tricks in InDesign when it comes to changing numbers, some of which work in other Creative Cloud tools.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You will also need to add a text frame containing some placeholder text, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe.

How to do it…

In order to format your text using a variety of character formatting options, follow these steps:

1. Using the Type tool, click and drag to select some text within your text frame. With this text selected, look at the Control panel, shown as item A in Figure 2.8. If you don’t see the Control panel at all, you can open it by clicking Control in the Window menu:

Figure 2.8: The InDesign interface showing the Control panel

The InDesign Control panel has two views, Character and Paragraph, and you can toggle between these using either of the two small icons marked as B in Figure 2.8. Switch to Character view now so that the top icon is highlighted, as seen in Figure 2.8.

2. Next, we will click the arrow next to the current font family marked as A in Figure 2.9. This will bring up the font options, where you can choose an alternative font family from a scrollable list. Depending on the font files installed, you may be able to expand the font family using the small arrow next to the font family name (marked as B in Figure 2.9). This will allow you to access variations of some fonts, such as Regular, Bold, or Italic. Select the font you wish to use now:

Figure 2.9: The font selection dropdown in InDesign

3. If you can’t see the name of the font you want, you can always search for it in the Adobe Fonts library. This is a library of over 2,500 font families, which you can access as part of your InDesign subscription. To do this, click the Find More tab (marked as C in Figure 2.9) and you will see a list of Adobe fonts. To use one of these, click the cloud icon to the right of the font name, marked as A in Figure 2.10. When you click back on the Fonts tab, the font you activated should show up (occasionally, it can take a few seconds to synchronize):

Figure 2.10: Find More fonts dialog

4. You can also search for a font by name; simply start typing the name in the search bar (marked as B in Figure 2.10), and all fonts with that text in the name will be listed.

Note

If you want to add your own font files to InDesign, you can copy the files into the Fonts folder in the InDesign installation directory, and they will show up when you restart InDesign.

5. If you work with a limited number of fonts (for example, to comply with brand guidelines), you might prefer to only see those fonts when opening the font selection dropdown. To do this, you can mark fonts as favorites by clicking the star icon, which shows up to the right of the font name when you hover over a font (marked as C in Figure 2.10), and then filtering to only show these favorites by clicking the Filter by favorites icon (marked as D in Figure 2.10).
6. Having now chosen the font you want to work with, we can change the font size. This can be done by clicking the dropdown for font size (marked as A in Figure 2.11), which is positioned to the right of the font family dropdown. You can choose from the preset sizes or just type a number straight into the font size box itself. My personal favorite method is clicking the font size box and then using the up and down keys on the keyboard to adjust the size 1 pt at a time. If you hold down the Shift key while using the arrows, it changes the size in 10-pt increments instead:

Figure 2.11: Character settings on the InDesign Control panel

Tip

When you are working in number boxes in Adobe tools, such as the font size box, many of them let you do sums. For example, typing 2 + 3 and hitting Return will set the size to 5 pt. You can use the +, -, *, and / characters for doing plus, minus, multiply, and divide calculations.

7. The next setting we want to adjust is the Leading setting, marked as B in Figure 2.11. Leading is the space between the lines in paragraphs; by default, it is set to Auto, which means as the font size changes, so does the leading. When set to Auto, the leading is always set to 120% of the font size, and this will be a good setting for most of your text. However, in this instance, we want to space the lines out further though, without changing the font size. To do this, just increase the leading value either by selecting a new value from the dropdown or by using any of the other methods for changing numbers that are shown in step 6.
8. Having chosen a font face and adjusted the size and leading, we now want to turn the text into capitals. You have two Caps options available in the Control panel:
   • The first is the All Caps button marked as C in Figure 2.11; this will turn all the selected letters into uppercase letters.
   • The second option is the Small Caps button marked as D in Figure 2.11.

In this instance, we are going to apply the All Caps method to the first three words (marked as A in Figure 2.12) by selecting them and clicking the Small Caps button, then on a new line apply small caps to some text (marked as B in Figure 2.12), again by selecting it and hitting the Small Caps button. Your content should now look something like that shown in Figure 2.12:

Figure 2.12: Text frame with the first line in all caps, then the second line in small caps

If small caps are available within the font face, InDesign will use these, but if not, InDesign will simulate small caps. You can control what scale InDesign uses for simulating small caps in the Preferences panel (Ctrl + K (PC)/Cmd + K (Mac)), under Advanced Type, marked as A in Figure 2.13:

Figure 2.13: Advanced Type preferences in InDesign

9. Having set the first three lines to All Caps, we now want to adjust the spacing between the second and third letters on that line. To do this, we will use the Kerning property, which is used to adjust the spacing between two individual characters. Click to place the cursor in between the second and third letters of the first line, then click into the Kerning box, marked as A in Figure 2.14. Use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to increase or decrease the kerning. In our case, we will set the value to 20.

As with the other number boxes, you can use the Shift key to move in larger increments, type numbers directly into the box, or select a value from the dropdown.

Note

In the Kerning and Tracking dropdown, you will see options for Metric and Optical, which are automatic kerning options, based on either the font design (metric) or the character shapes (optical). We are using manual kerning (and tracking) here, which is based on a percentage of the current font size being used.

10. Moving on to the second line, we are now going to set the spacing between the characters for the whole of the second line using Tracking. Select the whole line and click into the Tracking box, marked as B in Figure 2.14. Again, use the arrows to adjust the spacing until the second line is extended to the width of the frame, as shown by C in Figure 2.14:

Figure 2.14: Controlling kerning and tracking in InDesign

Whether you are adding in a trademark or copyright symbol, putting ordinals on dates, creating chemical formulae, or producing mathematical equations, Superscript and Subscript can be useful tools to get your text looking the way you want.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, you need a document open containing a text frame that you wish to adjust. If you don’t already have this, you can create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You can then add a text frame, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe. Finally, you will need the Control panel set to show character formatting rather than paragraph formatting options, as shown in step 1 of the Adjusting character formatting recipe.

How to do it…

In order to use superscript and subscript to fine-tune your text, follow these steps:

1. In your text frame, add the following text: The 1st of January.
2. We are going to start by superscripting st in 1st, so select st and then click the Superscript icon (marked as A in Figure 2.15). This will cause st to reduce in size and be positioned higher up relative to the other text:

Figure 2.15: Superscript and Subscript options

3. On the next line in the text frame, we will add the following text: Water is H2O.
4. Now, select the number 2 in H2O and click the Subscript button (marked as B in Figure 2.15) to apply subscript to this, resulting in the number 2 dropping lower down.

Underlines and strikethroughs can be a great way to draw attention to content in a paragraph, but why stick to the default formatting? In this recipe, we will show you how to apply underlines and strikethroughs, and then subsequently change the formatting to match your exact needs. You will even learn a neat little trick using underlines to create a highlighter pen effect.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You will also need to add a text frame containing some placeholder text, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe. Finally, you will need the Control panel set to show character formatting rather than paragraph formatting options, as shown in step 1 of the Adjusting character formatting recipe.

How to do it…

In order to use and format underlines and strikethroughs on your text, follow these steps:

1. Select the text that you would like to apply your underline to and click the Underline button marked as A in Figure 2.16. The text will now have a thin black line below it, as marked by B in Figure 2.16:

Figure 2.16: Underline and strikethrough options in InDesign

2. We now want to change the formatting of the underline, so with the text still selected, hold down Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) and click the Underline button again. This will bring up the Underline Options dialog box (shown in Figure 2.17):

Figure 2.17: Underline Options dialog box

3. Before adjusting any settings, make sure to check the Preview checkbox within the dialog box, and now you can adjust any of the following settings and see the changes live on the document:
   • Weight: This determines the thickness of the underline or strikethrough line
   • Type: Lets you choose from a list of preset underline or strikethrough styles
   • Offset: A bit like the Baseline Shift property (see the next recipe), this applies an adjustment to the strikethrough or underline relative to the baseline of the text it is applied to
   • Colour: The color of the underline or strikethrough
   • Tint: Increase the lightness of the chosen color by increasing the white content
   • Gap Colour: If you choose a type that includes gaps, this lets you apply a color to those gaps
   • Gap Tint: Increase the lightness of the gap color by increasing the white content

In this instance, we will change the Colour setting to blue and adjust the Weight setting to 2 pt to make the line a little thicker.

Tip

If you would like to create a highlighter pen effect, simply apply an underline, switch the Colour setting to yellow, make the Offset value a negative number until the line is vertically in the middle of the text, and then increase the Weight value until it is the same height as the text. You can simply adjust the offset to fine-tune the positioning. See the text marked as E in Figure 2.16.

4. Next, we will apply a strikethrough. Select the text that you would like to apply your strikethrough to and click the Strikethrough button (marked as C in Figure 2.16). The text will now have a thin black line through the middle of it, as marked by D in Figure 2.16.
5. We now want to change the formatting of the strikethrough, so with the text still selected, hold down Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) and click the Strikethrough button again, which will bring up the Strikethrough Options dialog box, which will look very similar to the Underline Options dialog box.
6. Again, you will need to check the Preview checkbox in the dialog box to see any changes, and you can then adjust the settings for the strikethrough in the dialog box.

On rare occasions, I come across somebody who, for a variety of reasons, can’t Alt-/Option-click on the buttons to bring up the Underline Options and Strikethrough Options dialog boxes. If you encounter this, you can also open the Options dialog box from the drop-down menu at the top right of the InDesign program window, as marked by A in Figure 2.18:

Figure 2.18: Alternative method of accessing strikethrough and underline options

Sometimes you just want to quickly move a few characters, or even a word or two, up or down relative to the rest of the text. It might be special characters such as copyright or trademark symbols that don’t quite sit where you’d like, or maybe your bullets need a bit of tweaking, or it could just be things such as fractions that you’d like to smarten up a bit.

When working in InDesign, your text all sits on an invisible line called the baseline, and this baseline can be moved up and down. Using InDesign’s Baseline Shift feature, you can easily move the baseline for one or more characters, in effect moving the characters up or down relative to the rest of the text in that frame. In this recipe, we are going to look at how you can achieve this.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, you need a document open containing a text frame that you wish to adjust. If you don’t already have this, you can create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You can then add a text frame containing some placeholder text, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe.

Add a copyright symbol to your content, as shown in the Inserting special characters recipe in this chapter. You will need the Control panel set to show character formatting rather than paragraph formatting options, as shown in step 1 of the Adjusting character formatting recipe.

How to do it…

In order to use Baseline Shift to fine-tune your text, follow these steps:

1. Select the copyright symbol that you added to your text.
2. Click into the Baseline Shift box (marked as A in Figure 2.19) and use the up arrow on the keypad to increase the baseline shift value. You will see the copyright symbol is now moving up relative to the rest of the text:

Figure 2.19: Baseline Shift option on the Control panel

Having increased the baseline shift value and pushed the character up relative to the other text, we are now going to reverse this.

3. When selecting characters that have a baseline shift applied, you must select them on the original line the text was written on, and not the line it is now positioned on (as shown in Figure 2.20). Do this now with the text you selected in step 1 and set the baseline shift back to 0:

Figure 2.20: Example of text with baseline shift applied and baseline selected