Working with Type

Vocabulary & Anatomy

Many fine books have been written about typography, and you should own some of them. (Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, Fourth Edition [Hartley and Marks Publishers, 2013] and Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition [Princeton Architectural Press, 2010] come to mind.) There’s a huge number of websites on the topic as well (fontology at fonts.com, for example). However, I wanted to illustrate a few terms here since you will encounter most of them in InDesign’s interface and will have to make decisions about those and others when choosing or purchasing type, a task my friend Jason Hoppe regularly refers to as “type casting.”

When buying fonts, you must decide between serif and sans-serif and wade through descriptions using terms like “x-height” or “stress,” as well as less measurable things like a typeface’s personality. The books and sites mentioned above will help there. Actually doing what’s suggested, like adjusting and fine-tuning the type you use in InDesign, is covered here.

Adjusting Type in InDesign

Kerning & Tracking

Each glyph in a font has a width, which includes a little bit of space on each side of it. We might naively picture a box or block around each glyph, and thus a row of blocks, one abutting the previous, to form words:

Although that might seem like the right thing to do, it looks wrong—the “T” and the “o” that follows it look too far apart. The type designer therefore builds into the metrics of the font kerning data for many pairs of glyphs, adjusting how they should fit together. We choose Metrics in the Kerning menu of the Control panel, the Character panel, or in the Paragraph or Character Style Options dialog boxes.

That often suffices, especially at body copy sizes (like this paragraph). At larger display sizes (like the word “Tomorrow” above), we may want to adjust even more ourselves.

We do so by positioning the text cursor between two glyphs and then holding down option/alt while tapping the left or right arrow keys (← or →). You might also try choosing Optical from the Kerning menu.

If you like the relative spacing between each pair of glyphs, but wish for more or less over a whole range of glyphs (as in the word “Tomorrow,” or an entire paragraph or more), highlight that range of text and use the same shortcuts. Instead of adjusting the Kerning, this changes the Tracking. Picture an accordion bellows being squeezed or expanded. Both kerning and tracking can be set numerically (in thousandths of the point size) via their menus in the Control panel, the Properties panel, the Character panel, or in the Paragraph or Character Style Options dialog boxes.

Leading

There are many reasons why you would want to adjust Leading. If you make text larger and its leading had been fixed at a small value for the smaller type, it’s likely that the leading will not change. That could yield a situation like the one below. Another reason could be the use of small-caps or all-caps, which have no descenders and may withstand a smaller leading value. Wide columns of text make it hard for the eye to track from line to line unless the space between each line is greater.

To adjust leading, the text needs to be selected. By default, that means highlighting every bit of text in the range where the leading needs adjusting. However, if you changed your preferences for “Type” (page 167) to apply leading to entire paragraphs, your selection just has to touch the paragraphs that need the fix. If it’s only one paragraph, the cursor just has to be somewhere in that paragraph.

We can change the leading to Auto or a numeric value (in points) via the Leading menu of the Control panel, the Properties panel, the Character panel, or in the Paragraph or Character Style Options dialog boxes. Auto is usually 120% of the point size of the text, but even that can be redefined when making paragraph styles. To adjust leading visually for the selected text, hold down option/alt then tap the up or down arrow keys (↑ or ↓).

Scaling

When you resize a text frame, the text’s point size field in the Control panel or the Character panel can show two values (a recording of before and after values). To avoid this, set your General Preferences as found in “Apply to Content/Adjust Scaling Percentage” (page 165).

Proper Italic & Bold

Complete typefaces (font families) almost always come with a number of fonts, most commonly italic and bold to accompany the regular. Trying to fake these is fairly strongly discouraged as this usually just makes the text harder to read.

Above, the faux version for italic is made using the Skew (False Italic) field in the Control panel, and the faux bold is made by adding a .5 point stroke to the regular version. Note in the fake bold example how the counter in the “e” is nearly filled in.

Alignment

There are five alignments that yield ragged type, including the familiar Left, Right, and Center alignments. The last two, Towards or Away from spine, can be useful to keep text symmetrical across a spread. For example, the frames that hold page numbers benefit from these.

There are four Justify alignments, which differ only in how the last line of a paragraph is treated (left, right, or center aligned, or spread from left to right frame-edge). Narrow columns with these alignments can have uncomfortable word spacing and/or lots of hyphens. Inserting a Forced Line Break (also known as a “soft return,” created by typing shift-return/shift-enter) can make word spacing even worse in justified text. A trick I sometimes employ is putting in a Right Indent Tab (shift-tab) just before the Forced Line Break.

Indents & Spacing

Adding simple Left and Right indents, especially when combined with Space Before and After, is an effective way to visually separate a paragraph from those around it. Consider an extended quote or excerpt, for example. For consistency, it’s best to set these as part of a paragraph style. To do so in an ad hoc way, you can use the Control panel or the Paragraph panel (see figure).

To create a hanging indent, first set a positive Left Indent (perhaps 12 points). Then set an equal but negative First Line Left Indent (as in −12 points). To remove the hanging indent, reverse those steps: remove the First Line Left Indent first, then set the Left Indent to zero. You can do the analogous thing on the right-hand side with the last line of a paragraph: set the Right Indent to a positive value, then set the Last Line Right Indent set to a negative one. If you need more than a couple of paragraphs with hanging indents, it’s best to make a paragraph style.

If you need only one hanging indent, or if you don’t require consistency in them, there’s a quick way to make one. In the first line of a paragraph, position the cursor to where you’d like the other lines left indented. Then insert the Indent to Here character by typing ⌘- (that’s a backslash) on Mac or Ctrl- on Windows. When showing hidden characters, it resembles a dagger (†) character (see the example that follows). Unfortunately, there’s no way to “record” this in a paragraph style.

Font Technologies

When purchasing fonts or activating them with the Adobe Fonts service (formerly Typekit), you may find different formats and capabilities available. Historically, Type 1 (a technology based on Adobe’s PostScript language) has been considered the most reliable. However, Type 1 fonts have two pieces that need to be installed: the screen version and the printer version. TrueType, originally developed at Apple and then licensed by Microsoft, can be reliable, too, and has the advantage of having both the screen and printer parts in one package. Some TrueType fonts also have a feature called hinting that aids on-screen legibility. The downside? Only some TrueType fonts are cross-platform (Mac and Windows compatible).

So, Adobe and Microsoft developed OpenType to offer all the advantages of Type 1 and TrueType and to avoid their problems. OpenType fonts can also support more glyphs—a lot more: up to 65,536. They often have special features and multiple alternates for many characters. If you couldn’t tell, I like OpenType fonts.

Adobe Fonts and Other Font Services

Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions come with the Adobe Fonts service. With it, you can “sync” many fonts to your computer, where they become available to any application. When opening a document with missing fonts, InDesign checks to see if they’re available in Adobe Fonts and offers to sync them for you. Almost all fonts available for desktop syncing are OpenType fonts (only one foundry’s are not) and many come with diverse OpenType features.

MyFonts.com has a similar service called SkyFonts to sync fonts you’ve subscribed to (like Adobe Fonts) or to install fonts you’ve purchased. Fontstore is another newer service.

When you purchase or sync dozens or hundreds of fonts, you may crave a font manager more capable than, say, Apple’s Font Book app. Extensis offers Suitcase Fusion, which allows a user to enable or disable fonts from any source (to keep your system’s resources less busy). It also allows you to see all your fonts from InDesign and it activates fonts when a file is opened that requires them. Suitcase isn’t the only font manager. FontAgent has been around for a while in various forms and does many of the things Suitcase does. FontBase is a new and growing app. There are many more that are for either Mac or Windows only.

Missing Fonts

If a font is missing, its text is highlighted in pink. Choose Type > Find Font, then highlight the noted font and choose a substitute in Replace With. I usually check Redefine Style When Changing All as well. Click Change All.