Learn how to enhance your designs by ensuring they are free of spelling mistakes and bad typography. This InDesign tutorial will take you through the process of using the spell check feature and the Find/Change function to eliminate common design errors.
Key Insights
- The tutorial covers spell checking in InDesign, demonstrating how missing or incorrect spellings can be identified and corrected within a text frame or story.
- The InDesign spell check feature is also capable of identifying certain nouns, acronyms, and plurals that it may deem as misspelled.
- The tutorial introduces the Find/Change function in InDesign, which can be used to correct common typographical errors such as double spacing between sentences.
- The Find/Change function can also be utilized to correct incorrect usage of punctuation, such as the improper use of a hyphen instead of an em dash.
- These tools can be used to spell check and correct typography across an entire document, ensuring a high standard of professional design.
- Upon completion of these exercises, users will have improved their design skills, leading to cleaner, more professional-looking work.
Explore a comprehensive InDesign tutorial that covers spell-checking and implementing Find/Change feature to eliminate common typography errors.
This exercise is excerpted from Noble Desktop’s past Adobe InDesign training materials and is compatible with InDesign updates through 2020. To learn current skills in InDesign, check out our InDesign Bootcamp and graphic design classes in NYC and live online.
Topics Covered in This InDesign Tutorial:
Spell Checking, Find/change
Exercise Preview
Exercise Overview
Great designs are not as good when they contain spelling mistakes, so in this exercise, you’ll learn InDesign’s spell check feature. We will also show you how to use Find/Change to get rid of some bad typography.
Spell Checking
- If yourname-leaders.indd is not already open, re-open it.
- At the bottom of the right-hand page (pg 21), zoom in on the author bio text frame.
- Put the text cursor in the text frame.
- Go into Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling.
- The spell check automatically starts and InDesign finds the first misspelled word. At the bottom, set the Search menu to Story. A story refers to a single text frame, or a series of threaded text frames. We’re only spell checking this text frame now.
- Click Start.
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InDesign may think nouns or acronyms are misspelled. It will even sometimes think a plural is incorrect. You have to make a judgment on each word:
If the word is correct and you don’t want to change it, click Ignore All or Skip.
Otherwise, to fix the misspelling you can do one of two things:- Select a suggested spelling and click Change.
- If a proper spelling is not suggested, type it in and click Change.
- If you want more practice doing this, change the Search menu to Document (at the bottom of the Check Spelling panel).
This will spell check all text in the file.
Using Find/Change to Fix Some Bad Typography
- This author occasionally typed in two spaces between sentences, which is a big no-no in professional design. To fix it go to Edit > Find/Change.
- Select the Text tab at the top.
- Make sure the Direction is set to its default, Forward.
- From the Search menu, choose Document.
- Under Find what, delete anything that is there and press the Spacebar twice.
- Under Change to, delete anything that is there and press the Spacebar once.
- Click Find Next.
- Once it finds one, click Change to see that it works.
- Click Change All to correct all instances of the search term.
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A dialog that says how many replacements were made pops up. Click OK to dismiss it.
The author also incorrectly used a hyphen, surrounded by spaces, instead of an em dash, which should NOT have spaces around it.
- In the Find/Change panel, delete the current values for Find what and Change to.
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Edit the find and change fields as follows:
Find what: Type in one space, then a hyphen(-), then another space. Change to: From the menu to its right, choose Hyphens and Dashes > Em Dash. Make sure there are no spaces before or after the em dash!
- Click the Find Next button, and once it finds one, click Change All.
- Click OK to dismiss the dialog, then close the Find/Change panel.
You’re done with Leaders Magazine! Pat yourself on the back and save your hard work.