Creative Mentor

Archive for the ‘Text’ Category

Ever wondered how to get tabs to work (for you) in InDesign?

By popular demand Ive added a series of videos explaining the key areas of working with tabs, including: Working with the tabs panel, setting tabs, editing tabs, working with right indents and leaders, aligning to decimals and Working with first line indents.

Hope this helps!

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Working with the tabs panel

Setting Tabs

Editing Tabs

Right Indent Tabs & Leaders

Aligning to Decimals

Indents & First Line Indents

Posted by Neil Oliver in Tabs, Text | 12 Comments

Eliminate the annoyance of text turning into grey bars when zooming out…

Ask me what my number one annoyance is in InDesign and I’ll probably give you a different answer every time. But this one is up there. Have you noticed when you zoom out a few times that all the text within your document turns into grey bars? How are you supposed to get a good feel for your design when this happens?

I find this problem really distracting, and if you do too you can turn it off via your preferences. Choose, InDesign > Preferences (Mac) or Edit > Preferences (PC) and select the Display Performance tab, under Adjust View Settings you will see by default Typical. Below are all the settings relevant to that Typical display setting. If you change Greek Type Below from 7pt to 1pt you won’t have to worry about the problem of text turning to grey bars again when zooming out.

I would also recommend changing the Greek Type Below option for the Fast and High Quality settings. This can be done by changing the Adjust View Settings drop down menu to Fast or High Quality and entering 1pt in the Greek Type Below field.

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Preferences, Text | No Comments

Community service announcement! Think twice before hitting Enter twice…

I continually see people (newbies and other) adding space after a paragraph by hitting Enter twice on their keyboard (cringe). Please don’t. If you need to add space after a paragraph, take advantage of the wonderful typographic control InDesign provides. The best way to control the space after a paragraph is to use the “Space After” field within the paragraph panel/control panel. Doing this allows you to edit spacing easily.

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Text | 3 Comments

Maximise your control when copying and pasting from MS Word to InDesign…

I continually cross paths with InDesign users who run into the problem of copying text from MS Word, and then pasting into InDesign, finding that they have retained MS Words formatting attributes. Or people who want to retain MS Words formatting and can’t.

There is a quick fix to this problem; it all comes down to one preference. If you go to your preferences, InDesign > Preferences > Clipboard Handling (Mac), Edit > Preferences > Clipboard Handling (PC), under the “When placing text and table from other applications” section you will find two options. All Information or Text Only. All Information means all formatting from MS Word will be retained when you paste into InDesign. Text Only means all formatting will be removed when you paste. That’s it.

If you want to set this preference permanently you may want to check out the differences between local and global preferences in InDesign here.

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Preferences, Text | 1 Comment

Use a Special Character to Indent text independently from your text frames default left Indent

You have the ability to set your own custom Indent when working within a paragraph. Insert your type cursor before the character you want to indent, then go to the “Type” menu and choose “Special Characters > Other > Indent to Here”. An indent is now set at that point. Every line of text after that indent will now line up exactly with your custom indent. This eliminates the need for unnecessary tabbing and all the other crazy work arounds people use to do this.

If you want to speed things up, you could “Right Click” (Two button mouse) or “Control Click” (One button mouse), you could also use the keyboard shortcut “Command” + “\” (MAC) or “Control” + “\” (PC).

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Special Characters, Text | No Comments

Eliminate a few clicks from your life with this handy hand tool shortcut…

Have you noticed when you’re working within a text frame with your type tool active, you can’t pan around to another part of the document page without adding multiple spaces to your text? This is a regular annoyance for a lot of InDesign users.

The solution is simple! If you are working with text and you have your type tool active within a text frame, simply hold down “Option” (MAC) or “Alt” (PC). You have now temporarily changed to the Hand Tool and can navigate around your page freely. When done, let go of Option/Alt and you can continue working with your text. This eliminates the need to use scroll bars or manually select different tools from the tools panel.

You could also try ”Command” (MAC) or “Control” (PC) which allows you to move the active text frame.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Text | 3 Comments

How do you create outlines of text in an InDesign document?

There a quite a few options available when creating outlines of text in InDesign. You can create outlines of a frame, or a selection of text, you can create outline of text and retain the original text frame maintaining the original text or even worry about creating outlines at the end when you export to PDF. Lets take a look at these options.

To create outlines of all text within a frame, first select the frame with the selection tool then choose “Type > Create Outlines”. If you want do create outlines of text within a frame and maintain an original version of the text within the frame hold “Option” (Mac) / “Alt” (PC). You now have an outlined copy of the text directly on top of the original live text. Use your selection tool to drag either the outlined or live text away.

To create outlines of selected text within a frame, first use your type tool to select some text then choose “Type > Create Outlines”. When you do this the selected text which has now been outlined becomes an inline anchored object. You will not be able to change any formatting attributes now as it is outlined text. Be sure to make a duplicate of any text you might need for later use before you go ahead and do this.

Now, I did mention creating outlines of your text when creating a PDF. This really needs a post of its own so check back soon for instruction on doing this.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL

Video Instructions (all videos are quicktime movies): 1. Click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink, a new window appears, once the video has downloaded completely (speed varies depending on internet connection) the video will commence. 2. Right click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink and choose “DOWNLOAD LINKED FILE AS” to save the video to your computer. Once downloaded open the .mov file in Quicktime to watch. 3. Subscribe to the creativementor.com.au now Podcast through iTunes.

Posted by Neil Oliver in Text | 1 Comment

An easy way to reduce the empty space within your text frames.

There is a fantastic new feature within Indesign CS3 that allows you to quickly remove any unwanted empty space within a text frame. It’s simplicity is obvious, though there are a few variables depending on what part of the text frame you are clicking that you should be aware of.

So we have a sentence of type (see image below), and as you can see the text frame is way larger that the actual text. Its always best practice to minimize the size of all your frames in your layouts, so you can easily select other page elements without having to use keyboard shortcuts to select through page elements on top of other page elements, and also to minimize transparency effecting page elements unnecessarily.

So the trick is to make sure you have the text frame you want to remove empty space from active, then if your text frame needs to snap up from the bottom and the right as per the image above, you simply double click the lower right corner point of the active text frame, and the frame snaps to the last character on the right and to the baseline of the type (see image below).

I did say there are some variables depending on what part of the text frame you are clicking that you should be aware of so here they are;

• If you double click any corner point two things will happen, the frame with snap both horizontally and vertically in direction

• If you double click the lower centre point of the text frame the result will be the frame snapping to the baseline of the last line of text, however any empty space to the right will remain

• If you were to double click on the centre point on the right side of a text frame the result will be the text frame snapping to the last rightmost character in the frame, however any empty space below will remain.

So depending on what point of the text frame you double click on you will get a certain result. Play around with it, try the other text frame points not mentioned here.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL

Posted by Neil Oliver in Text | 1 Comment