Changing the spacing between paragraphs

To adjust space between paragraphs, you select the paragraphs and specify a Space Before and/or Space After value. (The amount of space between paragraphs ends up being the sum of the space after one paragraph and the space before the next paragraph. Therefore, it’s generally best to use one or the other—space before or space after—to prevent confusion.) The Space Before and Space After values can be saved in paragraph styles and applied consistently across a document.

Here, you’ll add more space between paragraphs in the Chocolate-Covered Strawberries recipe at the bottom of the page.

1. Scroll and zoom as necessary to view the recipe in the green box.

2. Using the Type tool (), click immediately in front of the first line of the recipe, “1/2 lb strawberries with stems.”

3. Drag to select all the recipe text from “1/2 lb strawberries with stems” to “Protein 0g.”

4. In the Paragraph panel, click the up arrow once next to Space After ().

   This adds .0625 inches (or 4.5 points) of space between paragraphs. The text will overset the frame, but this will be resolved later with the addition of columns.

   

5. Choose Edit > Deselect All.

6. Choose File > Save.

Adding a font from Adobe Fonts

This exercise uses Adobe Caslon Pro, which is available for free from Adobe Fonts. If the font is already installed on your system, follow the steps to see how you can add another font.

1. In the Character panel, click the arrow to the right of Font to display the menu.

2. Click Find More at the top of the menu.

   

3. Scroll down in the list to locate Adobe Caslon Pro.

4. Click the Activate button () to the right of the font family folder, and then click OK to confirm.

   Tip

   A font family is a collection of styles of the same font. For example, the Adobe Caslon Pro family includes the following fonts: Regular, Italic, Semibold, Semibold Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. You can activate the entire family or an individual style within the font.

   

Applying a font, style, size, and leading

First, you’ll apply a different font to the headline and then to the first character of the headline. Next, you’ll change the font family, style, size, and leading for the text in the quote on the left side of the page.

1. Scroll and zoom as necessary to view the headline.

2. Using the Type tool (), select the story headline, “Strawberries,” at the top of the page.

3. Click the Font menu in the Character panel. Scroll through the list to see how “Strawberries” looks in various fonts.

   Tip

   For a little more control, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move up and down in the Font menu.

4. In the list, find the font family you just activated, Adobe Caslon Pro, which may be alphabetized under “C.”

5. Click the arrow to the right of Adobe Caslon Pro to open the font family, and select Regular from the menu.

   

6. Using the Type tool, click immediately to the left of the first “S” in the “Strawberries” headline. Drag to select the “S.”

7. In the Character panel, select Italic from the Style menu below the Font menu.

   

   Now you will work on the quote on the left side of the page: “You stand out like a strawberry in a bowl of peas.” Scroll and zoom as necessary to view the quote.

8. Using the Type tool (), click inside the quote’s text frame. To select the entire paragraph, quadruple-click (click four times rapidly).

9. In the Character panel, set the following options:

   Tip

   To quickly select a font, you can type the first few letters in the Font field until it is recognized.

   • Font: Adobe Caslon Pro

   • Style: Semibold Italic

   • Size: 25 pt

   • Leading: 35 pt

   

10. Click the Character panel menu, and select OpenType. Notice that Swash is already selected, indicating that some glyphs have already been replaced with more ornate glyphs.

    Tip

    In the OpenType menu, the options in brackets are not available for the selected font.

11. Select Swash to deactivate this feature, and notice the changes (such as the Y vs. ϒ in Adobe Caslon Pro Semibold Italic). Select Swash from the OpenType menu again to reactivate the feature.

12. If the OpenType badge () is not displayed somewhere on the paragraph, click in the quote’s paragraph four times to reselect it.

13. Click the OpenType badge, which offers another way to access OpenType features available in the font.

14. Check Discretionary Ligatures along with Swash, and note how the two “st” glyph pairs are replaced with an “st” ligature: st.

    

    Tip

    Ligatures combine two or three glyphs into a single glyph to achieve a more harmonious look. Common ligatures include the “fi” and “fl” letter pairs.

15. Choose Edit > Deselect All.

16. Choose File > Save.

Adding a special character

Many types of special characters—such as bullets, checkboxes, accented characters, and ornamental curlicues—are used in documents for useful and decorative purposes. Now you’ll add a decorative character in the lower-left corner of the page.

1. If necessary, scroll down to see the text frame below the quote about peas.

2. Using the Type tool (), click to place an insertion point in the text frame.

3. Choose Type > Glyphs. You can use the Glyphs panel to view and insert OpenType attributes, such as ornaments, swashes, fractions, and ligatures.

4. In the Glyphs panel, choose Ornaments from the Show menu.

5. Locate the heart-shaped character (), and double-click it.

   Tip

   You can access some of the more commonly used glyphs (such as the copyright and trademark symbols, bullets, and dashes) in the Type menu (Insert Special Character) and the context menu. To access the context menu, right-click at the insertion point.

   

6. Choose Type > Glyphs to close the Glyphs panel, and then choose File > Save.

Finding fonts in the Font menu

InDesign provides multiple ways to quickly find fonts in the Font menus that are available in the Control, Character, and Properties panels.

Tip

When logged into Creative Cloud, you also can activate fonts through fonts. adobe.com and the Manage Fonts link in the left column of the Creative Cloud app.

• Name Search: A quick way to find a font is to start typing the font name in the Font field. For example, as you type “Cas” for Adobe Caslon Pro, all fonts with those three characters in it are listed. By default, InDesign searches by the entire font name. You can click the search icon () to the left of the font name to search by first word only. In that case, you would need to type “Adobe Cas” for the same result.

• Filter by Class: Select a font classification from the Filter menu (), such as Serif or Script.

• Favorites: For quick access to fonts you use frequently, click the star to the right of a font name in any Font menu. Then, click Show Favorite Fonts () at the top of the menu.

• Font Similarity: Click Show Similar Fonts () to the right of a font to display visually similar fonts in the menu.

Icons in the Filter menu indicate the visual characteristics of each font classification.

Applying a stroke and fill to text

Next, you’ll add a fill color and stroke to the glyph you just added.

1. With the Type tool () still selected, select the heart-shaped glyph.

2. In the Character area of the Properties panel, type 122 pt in the Font Size field. Press Enter (Windows) or Return (macOS).

3. In the Appearance area of the Properties panel, do the following:

   • Select the Fill box (), and click the Strawberry Red swatch.

   • Click the up arrow next to the Stroke Weight field to apply a 1 pt stroke.

   • Select the Stroke box (), and click the Stem Green swatch.

4. Click next to the character so that you can view the stroke effect.

   

5. Press Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows) or Shift+Command+A (macOS) to deselect anything on the page. Choose File > Save.

Inserting fraction characters

The recipes in this article do not use actual fraction characters—rather, the 1/2 is built with a numeral 1, a slash, and a numeral 2. Most fonts contain individual characters for common fractions such as ½, ¼, and ¾. When available, these elegant fractions look much more professional than using numerals and slashes. You will try several methods for inserting fractions here.

1. Scroll and zoom as necessary to view the recipe.

2. Using the Type tool (), drag to select the “1/2” in the first line, “1/2 lb strawberries with stems.”

3. Choose Type > Glyphs to open the Glyphs panel.

   Tip

   If you are working on a cookbook or other document that requires a variety of fractions, the fractions built into most fonts will not cover all the values you need. You will need to research numerator and denominator formatting options, which are available in some OpenType fonts, or purchase a specific fraction font.

4. Choose Numbers from the Show menu. (If necessary, scroll up in the menu to locate the Numbers option.)

5. Locate the ½ fraction. If necessary, resize the panel and scroll to see more characters.

6. Double-click the ½ fraction to replace the selected 1/2 in the text.

   Notice that the ½ fraction is stored in the Recently Used boxes at the top of the Glyphs panel. Now you’ll replace the “1/2” in the second line of the recipe.

   

7. Drag to select the “1/2” in “1/2 cup chocolate chips” in the next line of the recipe.

8. Double-click the ½ fraction in the Recently Used box at the top of the Glyphs panel.

9. Drag to select the “1/4” in “1/4 cup sprinkles” in the third line of the recipe.

   

10. Point at the blue underline that displays under “1/4” and click the fraction to replace the 1/4 with 1/4.

11. Close the Glyphs panel, and choose Edit > Deselect All.

    Note

    Only OpenType fonts offer convenient inline access to glyph variations.

12. Choose File > Save.

Specifying columns for a text frame

The recipe in the green text frame will look better and be more legible if it’s divided into two columns with a rule between the columns.

1. Using the Selection tool (), click the recipe’s text frame to select it.

2. Choose Object > Text Frame Options, and then click the General tab. Check Preview to see the changes.

3. In the Columns area, enter 2 in the Number field.

4. Press Tab to select the Gutter field, and then type .25 in.

   

5. Click the Column Rules tab at left, and then check Insert Column Rules.

6. Under the Stroke area, enter 1 in the Weight field and select Strawberry Red from the Color menu. Drag the dialog out of the way to see the changes.

   

7. Click OK, and choose File > Save.

Creating a straddle head

The heading for the recipe needs to span the two columns. You can do this with a paragraph format rather than by placing the heading in its own text frame.

1. Using the Type tool (), click in the “Chocolate-Covered Strawberries” heading. This selects the paragraph for formatting.

   Tip

   You can also access the Span Columns controls in the Control panel.

   

2. Select Span Columns from the Paragraph panel menu ().

3. In the Span Columns dialog, select Span Columns from the Paragraph Layout menu.

4. Choose All from the Span menu, and select Preview to confirm the change.

5. Click OK.

6. Choose File > Save.

Adjusting columns

Now that the heading is positioned, you can complete the fine-tuning of the recipe sidebar by balancing the amount of text in each column. You can do this automatically by selecting Balance Columns in the General tab of the Text Frame Options dialog (Object menu) or by inserting a “break character” that shifts text to the next column, frame, or page.

1. Using the Type tool (), click immediately before “Nutritional Facts” in the recipe.

2. Choose Type > Insert Break Character > Column Break.

3. Choose File > Save.

Hanging punctuation outside the margin

Sometimes, particularly with punctuation at the beginning and end of lines, margins that are in fact even may appear uneven. To fix this visual discrepancy, designers use optical margin alignment to “hang” punctuation and swashes on characters slightly outside the text frame.

In this exercise, you will apply optical margin alignment to the main story.

1. Using the Selection tool (), click to select the text frame containing the main story, starting with “Heart-shaped fruit that’s good for your heart?”

2. Choose Type > Story to open the Story panel.

3. Select Optical Margin Alignment. Enter 14 pt in the field and press Enter or Return.

   Tip

   When using Optical Margin Alignment, specifying an Align Based On Size setting that matches the point size of the text in the frame produces the best results.

   

4. Click the Story panel’s close box, and then choose File > Save.

Adjusting the tracking and kerning

Tracking increases or decreases spacing across a range of selected letters. By adjusting kerning, you can add or subtract space between specific letter pairs. You can use both kerning and tracking on the same text.

Here, you’ll track out the “A BITE OF DELIGHT” heading for effect and then track in the “Strawberries” heading. Finally, you will manually kern the space between the swash “S” and the remainder of the “Strawberries” headline.

1. To see the results of the tracking and kerning more clearly, scroll and zoom as necessary to view the top quarter of the page.

2. Using the Type tool (), click in the “A BITE OF DELIGHT” heading at the top of the page. Click three times to select the entire heading.

3. In the Character panel, choose 100 from the Tracking menu ().

   

4. Click in the “Strawberries” heading and click two times to select the entire heading.

   Tip

   When you kern text, the right arrow key adds space and the left arrow key removes space when combined with the Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) key. To change the amount of kerning applied using the shortcuts, you can edit the Keyboard Increments value in Preferences (Units & Increments).

5. Type –20 in the Tracking field in the Character panel.

6. Click to place an insertion point between the “S” and the “t” in “Strawberries.”

7. Press Alt+Left Arrow (Windows) or Option+Left Arrow (macOS) on the keyboard three times to decrease the amount of space between the two characters.

   The Kerning field () in the Character panel and the Control panel lets you see and adjust the amount of space between characters.

   

8. Click the pasteboard to deselect the text. Choose View > Fit Page In Window to see the results.

9. Choose File > Save.

Hyphenation settings

Whether and how words are hyphenated at the ends of lines is a paragraph format. In general, Hyphenation Settings are editorial decisions, not design decisions. A publication’s style guide, for example, may specify that capitalized words should not be hyphenated.

1. Using the Type tool (), click to place an insertion point in the main story, starting with “Heart-shaped fruit that’s good for your heart?”

   Tip

   When you’re editing text, you can use the Hyphenate option in the Control panel or the Paragraph panel to quickly enable and disable hyphenation for selected paragraphs.

2. Choose Edit > Select All to select all the paragraphs in the story.

3. From the Paragraph panel menu, select Hyphenation. Make sure Preview is selected so that you can see the changes.

4. Deselect Hyphenate to see how the text looks with no hyphenation.

5. Select Hyphenate again, and then type 2 in the Hyphen Limit field to prevent more than two lines in a row ending with a hyphen.

6. Click OK to close the dialog, but keep the text selected.

   

   The hyphenation helps prevent gaps in the justified lines of text. However, the justified text is not suited to this casual magazine.

7. With the text still selected, press Ctrl+Shift+L (Windows) or Shift+Command+L (macOS) to align the text with the left margin.

8. Choose Edit > Deselect All, and then choose File > Save.

Inserting manual line breaks

Once a layout is nearly complete, you may want to fine-tune line breaks for aesthetic or contextual reasons. Here, you will add two line breaks to the quote on the left side of the page.

1. Using the Type tool (), click in the fourth line of the quote, immediately before the word “of.”

2. Enter a forced line break character by choosing Type > Insert Break Character > Forced Line Break, or pressing Shift+Enter (Windows) or Shift+Return (macOS).

3. Choose Edit > Deselect All, and then choose File > Save.

   

Understanding the Adobe Paragraph and Single-Line Composers

The density of a paragraph (sometimes called its “color”) is determined by the composition method used. InDesign’s composition methods consider the word spacing, letter spacing, glyph scaling, and hyphenation options you’ve selected and then determine the best line breaks. InDesign provides two options for composing text: the Adobe Paragraph Composer, which examines all the lines in a paragraph before composing each line, and the Adobe Single-Line Composer, which composes text one line at a time starting with the first line.

Note

The Adobe World-Ready Single-Line Composer and the Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer are intended for use with Middle Eastern languages. With these composers, you can enter text in a combination of Arabic, Hebrew, English, French, German, Russian, and other Latin languages.

• When you use the Paragraph Composer, InDesign composes a line while considering the impact on other lines in the paragraph to set the best overall arrangement of the paragraph. As you change type in a given line, previous and subsequent lines in the same paragraph may break differently, making the overall paragraph appear more evenly spaced. When you use the Single-Line Composer, which is the standard for other layout and word-processing software, InDesign recomposes only the lines following the edited text.

• The Single-Line Composer handles each line individually. As a result, some lines in a paragraph appear denser or sparser than others. Because the Paragraph Composer looks at multiple lines at once, it makes the density of the lines in a paragraph more consistent. Using the Single-Line Composer is helpful if you are adjusting all line breaks by hand in a design such as a wedding invitation.

The Adobe Paragraph Composer and Adobe Single-Line Composer—along with other hyphenation and justification controls—are available in the Paragraph panel menu.

Aligning text to tabs and adding tab leaders

Here, you’ll format the tabbed Nutritional Facts list in the Chocolate-Covered Strawberries recipe. The tab markers have already been entered in the text, so you will specify the final location of the text. In addition, you will enter a leader character to fill the space between the text and the tab stop.

1. Scroll and zoom as necessary to view the recipe.

2. To view the tab markers in the text, make sure that hidden characters are showing (Type > Show Hidden Characters) and that Normal Mode () is selected in the Tools panel.

3. Using the Type tool (), click immediately before “Serving Size” after the “Nutritional Facts” heading. Drag to select the text through the last line, “Protein 0g.”

4. Choose Type > Tabs to open the Tabs panel.

   When a text frame has an insertion point and enough space at the top, the Tabs panel snaps to the top of the frame so that the measurements in the panel’s ruler exactly match the text. Regardless of the position of the Tabs panel, you can enter values to set tabs with precision.

5. In the Tabs panel, click Right-Justified Tab (). This specifies that text aligns to the left of the tab stop.

6. Type 2 in in the X (tab stop) field, and press Tab to jump to the Leader field.

   You will now create a tab leader, such as the periods that lead your eye across the page in a table of contents. In this case, you will use a space between periods to create a more open dot sequence in the tab leader.

7. Type a period (.) and a space in the Leader field. Press Enter or Return to complete the tabs.

   The information following each tab marker in the selected text now aligns to the new tab stop, and a dotted line (of periods and spaces) helps lead the eye across the line.

   

8. Choose Type > Tabs to close the Tabs panel, and then choose Edit > Deselect All.

9. Choose File > Save.

Creating a numbered list with a hanging indent

InDesign makes it easy to create bulleted lists and numbered lists to clearly delineate information. Lists generally feature a “hanging indent” so that the text hangs to the right of the tab. Here, you will add step numbers to the recipe instructions.

1. Scroll and zoom as necessary to see the recipe at the bottom of the page.

   Tip

   Click the Options button next to the Bullets And Numbering buttons to fine-tune the numbering, bullet characters, spacing, and more.

2. Using the Type tool (), click immediately before the first step in the recipe, “Wash the strawberries.” Drag to select all four paragraphs through the word “minutes.”

3. Click the Numbered List button () in the Properties panel.

   

4. Deselect the text, and view the numbered list with the hanging indent.

5. Choose File > Save.

Applying shading to a paragraph

The final touch in this layout is using shading to create a reverse type effect for the recipe heading.

1. Using the Type tool (), click in the “Chocolate-Covered Strawberries” recipe heading. This targets the paragraph for formatting.

   Tip

   The paragraph-shading controls are available in the Control panel as well. To fine-tune the shading, choose Paragraph Borders And Shading from the Paragraph panel menu, and click the Shading tab at the top. You can also open the Paragraph Borders And Shading dialog by Alt-clicking (Windows) or Option-clicking (macOS) the Shading Color button in the Control panel or the Paragraph panel.

2. Select Shading in the lower-left corner of the Paragraph panel.

3. To select the color of the shading, click the Shading Color menu to the right of the Shading option. Select the Strawberry Red swatch.

   

4. Choose Edit > Deselect All.

5. Choose File > Save.

Applying a rule to a paragraph

Here you’ll add a rule below “A BITE OF DELIGHT” at the top of the page.

1. Choose View > Fit Page In Window.

2. Using the Type tool (), click to place an insertion point in the “A BITE OF DELIGHT” tagline.

   

3. Choose Paragraph Rules from the Paragraph panel menu.

4. At the top of the Paragraph Rules dialog, choose Rule Below from the menu, and select Rule On to activate the rule.

5. Select the Preview option. Move the dialog so that you can see the paragraph.

6. In the Paragraph Rules dialog, set these options:

   • Weight: 8 pt

   • Color: Stem Green

   • Width: Text

   • Type: White Diamond

   • Offset: .0625 in (one click of the up arrow)

   

7. Click OK to apply the changes. A rule now appears below the tagline.

8. Choose File > Save.

   Tip

   To learn more about typography and definitions of terms such as “widow,” see InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign (Adobe Press, 4th Edition, 2018).

9. To view your results at full screen, choose View > Screen Mode > Presentation.

10. When you’re finished viewing the document, press Esc.

    

Congratulations, you have finished the lesson. To finalize this article, you would likely spend time with an editor or a proofreader to fix any tight or loose lines, awkward line breaks, runts, widows, and orphans.