InDesign Intro Course: Type Formatting

Video Transcription

Let's take a look at how to do some type formatting, such as all caps and small caps, and OpenType options. I'm going to do this on an existing layout that I've started. I can open it by going to the "Open" button or going to "File" > "Open" and this is my InDesign file (.indd) for InDesign documents. To get more screen space, I'm going to hide my ruler because I don't need to see those rulers. I can go to "View" > "Hide Rulers" and that just gives me a little more available screen space for what I'm working with here.

When we're taking a closer look at this type, before I zoom in, just notice that I have some type here and on the bottom it looks like there's a gray line. If I zoom in closer, I'm going to use my zoom tool and drag to the right. As I zoom in closer, oh look, that's actually fine print. It's actually small little text, but when it gets too small on screen, they just gray it out and make it look like an actual line. This is called "the greeking of text." I have no need for the greeking of text if it's text, even if I can't read it. I still want it to look like text and not just a gray bar.

This is a preference that you can change. If you're on Windows, you go to "Edit" > "Preferences." On the Mac, I go to "InDesign" > "Preferences." In here, there is "Display Performance." I can go down here to Display Performance and there are multiple view settings you may use within InDesign. The default is "High Quality." These are the settings down here for High Quality, and "Greek Type Below" is set to 7. Anything that visually is smaller than 7 points, they just Greek it, or gray it out. I'm going to set this to zero and say "Don't do it." I may also sometimes use "Typical Display." I never use "Fast Display," but I do sometimes use "Typical" if I'm in a big document with lots of high-res graphics and my computer's running slower. I need to set this in both "High Quality Display" and "Typical Display."

Now I've changed that, I click "OK." That is an application-wide setting, meaning that I don't have to set it file by file. I can just set that on my computer as a one-time preference and I never have to worry about it again.

Now even though I can't really read it, it still looks like text. I know that that's text and not just a gray line, so now I can zoom in a little closer and I'm going to use my Option+Space shortcut (or on Windows, Alt+Space) to slide this up and get this nice, on-screen here. This text is right here. I want to make this all uppercase and it wasn't typed in all uppercase, but I want to style it as uppercase.

So I can double-click on the text box to switch over to my Type tool, and double-clicking on the text actually highlights it. I am in the Preview mode, which is why I don't actually see my text boxes until I hover over them. Over here at the bottom left button of my toolbar, I can go back into Normal mode if I want to see all of those boxes, but it's nicer to see my design in Preview mode.

So I can be in my Selection tool. I can hover over this and double-click to go into the box, and double-click again to highlight all the text in that box. One thing that you don't want to do is type out text yourself, if you can avoid it. If the type has already been put in there, if an editor or an author has already checked it and made sure it's good, if you go in typing out text, there's a good chance that you're going to mess something up. So it's better to style it as all uppercase.

If I'm going to type "Change Case," this is actually retyping the text. This is not a stylistic change. This is an I'm actually changing the characters. Up here in my Control Panel, in the Character Options, I see a button here for "All Caps." I can make it all caps.

Now there is another way to do this, and I want to clarify the differences between these things. So if I don't want to highlight this and see it highlighted, I can also do these things as well with the Selection tool, just selecting the text box. I do have to be in the Type tool to see those options, but I can do it without having to highlight all the text as long as I'm okay with that affecting everything in that box.

So there is another way to do this and what's the difference between that button and going up here and saying "Change Case" > "Uppercase?" What's the difference? Well, if I'm going to type "Change Case," this is actually retyping the text. This is not a stylistic change. This is an I'm actually changing the characters.

This button right here is a style. It's like if I were to italicize text. I can take the style off, add it, or remove it. I can switch from all caps to small caps, depending on the style I like. For example, down here, this is kind of interesting where we have typed in upper and lower case. I could go to small caps. Small caps are going to take any of your lowercase letters that were actually typed in and make them small capital letters. Any of the letters that were actually typed in uppercase will remain as uppercase letters, but will they be small or big? That depends on how they were originally entered in. So for example, if I take the word "like" and make it all lower case when I switch over to small caps, all of those letters are small caps now. If I type in capital T or lowercase t, they're both caps, but how tall they are depends on how they were originally entered in.

This is just a style that you might want to do. Later, when we take a look at things like paragraph styles or character styles, this is a style so it can actually be saved as a style and applied throughout your document. It's not actually going in and changing the original way the text was typed out, but it's actually just changing the style.

So, for example, let's say with this, maybe this wasn't typed in like this. Maybe this was typed in in a sentence case. This is actually going in when you're doing change case and retyping out the text. Not just changing the style of it. So, for example, what if you were doing small caps because you like small caps, but the first letter of every word really needs to be typed in uppercase letters to get the full effect in this case of the small caps? I don't want to have to redo that myself. So I can go up to change case and they have title case and it'll actually go in there and capitalize the first letter of every word regardless of whether you're in small caps or not. It's still doing that because it's actually changing what those characters are. It's not a style when you're doing change case.

And because it's not a style, you get uppercase, you get lowercase, you get sentence case and title case. Title case and sentence case you don't have as a style here for text. The only styles you have are no styling, which is whatever you typed it in as, small caps, and all caps. Those are the three styles you get. So in this case I want small caps and here I want all caps. That's what I want that kit and that's all right.

Change case is kind of permanent actually. Re-typing out the text and it's actually very nice to have title case and sentence case, but those are kind of a one and done. You run it and beyond that then really you want to do styling. So, in an ideal world, I would rather have things typed in either in lower case or upper and lower case. I don't ever really want to type in all caps because when you're in all caps already when it's been typed in that way, there is no style to go to lower case. The only styles you have are small caps and all caps. And so, if your original is typed in either in lower case or upper and lower case, you have the most flexibility. So, I would just say, don't type out your text in all caps. If you want it in all caps, style it that way.

So that's the deal with case. Now, what if I want to just make this kind of a little bit more visually interesting? What I can do is I can kind of have these, the e and the n, kind of hanging over the ends, and just as a stylistic thing, just kind of a nice little design part here. I'm just going to make this text a little smaller. And when I say hanging over, I'm going to move this middle part up.

Now, you could have it like this if you want, like the e kind of sitting up high, the end sitting up high, you could leave it with something like this, but what I want to do is I want to move the text that I have selected up and put a little divider line underneath that, just for a little stylistic thing, because I've got this nice little line right up there, and I'm going to tie into that line as a design motif. So, I want to push this text up. I want to do what's called baseline shift and so, right up here, we have our baseline shift that I can use to bump that up, so I can push that up here.

What you're looking at here is the arrow that's pointing to the thing that you're doing. You can also mouse over a cursor or hover over a cursor and you'll see a tooltip that'll tell you what that thing is. In the beginning, it takes a little while to get used to those icons, so hover over and see what it does. This is baseline shift. Baseline is the base or bottom that the text sits on. Descenders, like a g or a y, will descend below the baseline, but otherwise the bottom of most characters sit on what is called the baseline. Baseline shift shifts it up or down. If you go negative, you can go down. It's just it shifts it up or down off of that baseline. By making the text smaller and then shifting it up, I create some empty space down below that I can use to fill in with a line.

I'm going to use my line tool here and drag going across here. I'm going to use my selection tool and then use my arrow keys to nudge this up and down a little bit. I can pull the ends in or out after drawing this. The color of that line is set here under stroke. So I could make it a white one or make it an orange one. I don't have to pull up the stroke panel. I can go up here and change the stroke there. Let's say I like that. I'll click off to deselect it and that just kind of ties it all together to kind of make a little bit of a typographic illustration a little bit. It's just a little bit of a different thing that makes my content a little more unique.

Now for this disclaimer right here, this is the idea of an uninspirational poster. It's a joke, it's to be funny. I'd take the road less traveled if only it weren't a one-way street going the wrong way. So then down below here, if I zoom in here with Command/Control plus, not responsible for viewers feeling more depressed after this. It's all meant to be in good fun, so I want to put a little disclaimer on this. For that, I need a reference here, maybe like a little one or an asterisk or something, so that it can refer down to this. So that would be useful to have as a superscript or subscript potentially. Let's take a look at how that works.

So let's say I want to type this in. Here I'll put in a little reference. So let's say one because there's only one disclaimer there. I'm going to take the small caps off. I don't need that to be small caps anymore. And I'm going to zoom in on this, so we can really see it. We've got the superscript to move it up or the subscript to move it down. I don't want to do this subscript; I don't want to put that down. I want to do the superscript to move it up like so. You might also notice that when I hover over the one before I did that, that there's a blue line and it shows me different things that I can do. So I could click on that and that basically makes it the superscript if I want to. So that's doing a slightly different way, though, because you'll notice that button isn't checked. So I'll get to that in just a moment when we talk about fractions and that will connect it into to another way of doing that.

But for the most part, if you just want to do [what you know], you can go to superscript or the subscripts. There's also an underline if you want to do an underline or a strikethrough. So if you ever want to do strike-through text, you can do strike-through text as well. So those are those little buttons right there. But I want to do a superscript and then I'm going to hold my Option/Spacebar as I slide down over here. I'm going to type another one and a space, and that one also can be superscripted as well.

All right, now if that gets a little too small, you might want to do something like bold it just to help thicken that up just so it doesn't get too thin when that prints, because it is quite small text. Sliding over to here, what if I want to make this into a fraction? So kind of what I was implying with that little hover that showed up and how it does something a different way. These little hovers that you get there on some characters, those are for OpenType fonts and OpenType settings. What I mean by an OpenType font, so if I pull up my font menu right here.

This font that I'm using, Minion, is an OpenType font. OpenType fonts have additional options when compared to TrueType or PostScript fonts, and most fonts these days are now being released as OpenType fonts. If it's "O" for OpenType, that means there's the potential for additional features. How do you know which features this OpenType font can have? On the far right hand side of the Control Panel, there are three lines.

If you have any other panels, you'll notice there are little lined menus at the top right corner of pretty much every panel in Adobe programs. In that little menu is additional stuff, such as OpenType Options. Anything with a square bracket means a missing feature. There are other options, such as fractions. If I choose fractions, that will format the selected text as a fraction, assuming the font has that feature. It's possible with a different font that there will be square brackets around fractions because that particular font doesn't support the fractions feature. It's up to the font maker to program and design the characters.

Even within fractions, it's possible that it may work for some kinds of fractions but not others, depending on how they've made those fractions work. I can turn off superscript and turn on the superscript version of this. Look at the difference - the OpenType font is actually going in and choosing a different character.

So instead of just making a character smaller and pushing it up like changing the size and doing a baseline shift, see how this is thinner than the rest of the text? That's because the one that was actually designed into the OpenType font is a special character that's precisely been placed at the right vertical position, sized, and had its thickness designed.

The superscript button here is better than nothing, but if you can use the one that's built into the OpenType fonts, that one is going to be better because a type designer has taken the time to design a special superscript character. The same goes for the fractions down here—those characters were actually designed as fraction characters—so it's not just scaling a nine down and baseline shifting it. Whenever possible, if the OpenType font has these features, you're going to get the best quality typography. If not, you can do the faux or faked version of those things.

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