The basics
Let’s start with a basic type spec decision: point size. Generally, you choose a point size for one of two reasons: readability or copy fitting.

InDesign lets you specify point sizes down to one thousandth of a point. From a readability standpoint, though, there’s rarely a reason to choose a fractional point size, 10.5 point, for example. It’s very difficult to discern a half-point size difference in the first place, and if you decide 11 point is too small, 11.5 point probably isn’t going to look much better.

Over the length of a book, a half-point reduction in size could shorten the length of the text enough to eliminate a signature, which could save serious money. Half-point sizes may also occasionally help when setting type in narrow columns.

Leading generally follows suit, although you’ll find half-point leading increments useful more often than half-point type sizes. (As with point size, InDesign allows one-thousandth point leading precision.) But even then a half point of leading will only make a significant difference at smaller text sizes, with the impact being proportionately greater as the type gets smaller. An extra half point of leading in footnotes, for example, can make them easier to read. But above 12 point, experimenting with half-point leading is rarely worth the effort.

However, tiny leading adjustments come in handy when specifying a baseline shift. Baseline shifts are useful for visually aligning two characters, such as top-aligning a small dollar sign next to a price. Creating precise alignments depends on finely graduated adjustments. Like leading, baseline shifts can be a thousandth of a point, although you’ll never need such precision.

These insanely fine increments exist because InDesign uses them internally. When scaling drop caps, for example, it creates myriad minutely different sizes depending on their depth and the text’s size. Leading, likewise, needs to be finely adjusted to vertically justify type to fill a frame from top to bottom. Adobe made this degree of precision available to you, overkill though it may be.

When engineering the InDesign hyphenation and justification controls, Adobe did likewise, offering one-thousandth em increments for kerning and tracking adjustments.

Kerning and tracking
How fine is one thousandth of an em? So fine that you can’t see it. In text, a kerning adjustment this small can’t even be rendered by the typical imagesetter. At display size, when it might be as wide as a strand of hair, it’s too small to make a visible difference. The kerning tables in virtually all fonts specify adjustments no finer than one hundredth of an em.

If you click the Up and Down Arrows in the Kerning field located in the Character panel (Window>Type & Tables>Character), you can alter the spacing between characters in 10/1000 em increments. This is almost always more than fine enough. In fact, I use the Units & Increments section of the Preferences dialog (InDesign [PC: Edit]>Preferences>Units & Increments) to set the Kerning/Tracking to 20/1000 em, or 1/50 em. This becomes the adjustment increment when I use the kerning keyboard shortcuts: Option-Left Arrow key and Option-Right Arrow key (PC: Alt-Left Arrow key and Alt-Right Arrow key). Hold down the Command (PC: Ctrl) key at the same time and InDesign will multiply the effect by five, but I find this too coarse.

The tracking value of each line is unique: 0, –5, –10, and –20 thousandths of an em. Can you tell which is which? It’s not easy, which goes to show why increments of less than 1/100 em aren’t usually very useful. (Answers: line 1: –5; line 2: –20; line 3: 0; line 4: –10.)

The Character panel’s Tracking controls also work in 10/1000 em increments; as with kerning, you can type in any value you want. Although this isn’t very useful for kerning, it can be for tracking. For example, when you’re trying to eliminate a widow (a very short last line of a paragraph), you want to keep tracking changes to a minimum to avoid altering the texture of the whole paragraph. Here, tweaking spacing in 1/1000 em increments may do the trick. In such cases, this minute alteration is multiplied by the number of characters and spaces in the affected text. In a long paragraph, a small tracking change can make a big difference in how lines break, while being basically invisible otherwise.

Regulating character widths
The last control I want to mention is that regulating the set widths of characters. The horizontal and vertical scale of characters (also managed in the Character panel) and the degree of glyph scaling you’ll permit during hyphenation and justification (controlled in the Justification panel, accessed from the Paragraph panel’s flyout menu [Window>Type & Tables>Paragraph]) are controllable in 0.01% increments. Once again, this is overkill. Altering character widths enough to visibly change their appearance is rarely a good idea, but where minor tweaks are desirable, increments of 1% are more than fine enough.

In this 60 pt logo, getting the subscript “2” to bottom align and trademark bug to top align required precise baseline shifts. The “2” was sunk –9.8 pt, while the TM (set at 13 pt) was raised 33.2 pt. Only in fine alignment situations do you need to lead in such tiny increments.

When allowing glyph scaling during hyphenation and justification, you want to keep alterations in character width exceedingly subtle, so you’ll probably be working in a range of about plus or minus 1% in any case. Here, a 0.5% change in the allowable glyph width variation may make a difference, but smaller changes will likely produce very little in the way of better composition.

The only difference between these two paragraphs is that in the lower one, glyph scaling is turned on to allow a maximum character compression of 1%. This difference is virtually undetectable, even in the enlarged samples here.

The point of all of this is that you shouldn’t be intimidated by the exacting values InDesign lets you bring to bear on your type. In type, it’s the little things that count, but that doesn’t mean that everything that’s little counts.

Stroke panel
The appearance of every character you typeset is a product of three things: its outline shape (as described in its font); its fill color (usually black); and the stroke weight of its outline (usually zero). We’ll just focus on tampering with the last of these.

In Illustrator and InDesign, you can alter the stroke of a character by simply selecting it and changing its weight in the Stroke panel and its color in the Color or Swatches panel. Adding a black stroke to a character creates a fake bold—it’s usually not very pretty. If you add a white stroke to a character, you make it thinner, which is even less pretty, especially when carried to extremes.

In InDesign though, you can also apply various types of strokes to characters—dots, dashes, hash marks—and here’s where the fun really starts. The key to making it work is to convert the type to outlines, which turns the text into an independent graphic object—a compound path—no longer associated with any font. Most of the rest of the action takes place in the Stroke panel (Window>Stroke).

The three hard-to-decipher icons in the Stroke panel under the Align Stroke section define where a stroke will set relative to the character outline path: Center, Inside, or Outside.

Various examples
Let’s run through a couple of sequential manipulations for a sampler of what’s possible. The first example shows a simple word in its native condition set in 72-point Verdana. Select the text and choose Type>Create Outlines to convert it to a graphic object. Notice that the text still looks like its old self.

For the second example, open the Stroke panel, choose the Selection tool (V), click on the text to select it, set the Weight to 2 pt, and the stroke Type to Right Slant Hash. This creates type with razor stubble. Under the Align Stroke section, click on the Align Stroke to Center icon so the whiskers overlap the filled portions of the characters.

For the third example, make sure the text is selected and change the stroke Type to Straight Hash. Now open the Swatches panel (Window>Color>Swatches), click the Stroke icon at the top-left to apply the color to the stroke, and choose yellow. Return to the Stroke panel, set Gap Color to red, and Gap Tint to 67%. (Note: The gaps are the spaces between the whiskers.) The net effect is type surrounded with and orange and yellow zipper.

The final example shows a 3 pt stroke Weight, a White Diamond stroke Type, and the Fill color set to None in the Swatches panel, which makes the type itself disappear.

More variations
This next set of examples follow another pattern. The first example is good old 72-point Cooper Black. In the second example, set the Weight to 2 pt, the Stroke color to white, and Type to Japanese Dots to give the text a perforated edge. Once again, in the Align Stroke section, click the Align Stroke to Center icon.

The third example has the same Stroke panel properties as the second, but change the Stroke color to green and the Fill color to None. Now follow the dots. In the fourth example, set the Weight to 4 pt, the Gap Color to red, and the Fill color to yellow. This looks like holiday type to me, but I have no idea which one.

Finally, in the fifth example, something completely different: a classic inline effect. Set the stroke Weight to 4 pt, the Type to Thin-Thin, the Stroke color to Paper, the Fill color to black, and the Gap Color to None. Note: The Paper swatch in the Swatches panel translates to “see-through,” so the inline rule will take on whatever color paper the type is printed on.

These examples are just jumping-off points. Using the InDesign tools for creating your own custom stroke types (just choose Stroke Styles>New from the Stroke panel’s flyout menu), you can conjure effects as yet undreamed of.

Kerning controls
One last and important thing: When you convert type to outlines, you lose the ability to use your normal manual kerning controls for adjusting the spaces between characters. To manually kern these outlines, first deselect everything. Then choose the Direct Selection tool (A) and Option-click (PC: Alt-click) inside the character, which selects its entire path. Now use your Left and Right Arrow keys to nudge the selected character one way or the other.

If the nudge increments are too coarse, you can adjust them. Choose InDesign (PC: Edit)>Preferences>Units & Increments. Then, in the Keyboard Increments section, reduce the Cursor Key value from its default value of 0p1 to whatever suits you. You can specify decimal values down to one thousandth of a point (0p0.001).

Note that characters with counters—open spaces, as in an “o” or “p”—consist of two paths: one for the outer outline of the character and another for the counter. A two-story lowercase “g” (as in the Cooper Black font example) has two counters. Yet other characters, such as the exclamation point, come in two pieces. To select multiple paths, select the first using Option-click (PC: Alt-click), and then the successive by using Shift-Option-click (PC: Shift-Alt-click).

All of the color graphic elements in this example are actually rules, created automatically with a single mouse click, as part of paragraph and character styles.

Striking headings

The red headings in the figure here were created using a simple paragraph style. The trick is to use one paragraph rule that’s as wide as the text and so fat that the type can sit right on top of it. A second paragraph rule sits atop that one and extends the width of the column. Here’s how to build them in InDesign.

First, create a sample heading in the typeface, assigning the Leading and Font Size in the Control panel. Place your cursor somewhere in your heading text and open the Paragraph Styles panel (Type>Paragraph Styles). Select New Paragraph Style from the panel’s flyout menu and give the new style a logical name in the Style Name field. Then enable the Apply Style to Selection checkbox, which causes your sample heading to be progressively formatted as your build your style.

From the list on the left side of the dialog, click on Paragraph Rules. Then enable the Preview checkbox in the lower-left corner of the dialog so you can have an interactive view of your settings as you make and adjust them. The settings used to create the headings in this example are shown in the screen shot here.

In the Paragraph Rules section, select Rule Below from the menu and enable the Rule On checkbox. You should now see a rule appear on your sample heading. From the Color menu select the color you want; any custom color you create in the Color panel (Window>Color>Color) will also appear in this list.

In the Weight field, use the Up Arrow on the left to increase the thickness of the paragraph rule until it’s as heavy as you want it to be. The rule will grow downward from the baseline; to move it up to overlap your type and use the Down Arrow next to the Offset field. (This seems counterintuitive, but the Down Arrow creates negative values, which in this case a “rule below” actually moves it up.) Try different Offset and Weight values until the type appears centered vertically in the colored bar.

In the Width menu, choose Text and the rule shrinks horizontally to match the width of your heading. This probably leaves more color above and below the type than to its left and right. To balance the color all around, use the Down Arrows next to the Left and Right Indent fields to enlarge the width of the color bar. Don’t worry that the color on the left now extends beyond the left margin; we’ll tidy that up in a minute.

Now go back up to the top of the dialog, choose Rule Above and enable the Rule On checkbox. All the other values in the dialog are now reset to their defaults, awaiting your formatting choices for the upper rule. From the Width menu, choose Column and choose a matching Color as well as a rule Weight of your liking. Then use the Offset Up Arrow to move the top rule into position so that it top aligns with the text-width rule.

Your last task is to get the text-width rule to align flush left, as it should. Make a note of the Left Indent you applied to the Rule Below, and then click on Indents and Spacing from the list on the left. In the Indents and Spacing section, apply that Left Indent value as a positive value in the Left Indent field. You’ll see your text-width rule—and the text with it—snap into position along the left frame edge, aligned with the column-width rule. Click OK, and your paragraph styles are complete. If you want to make changes later—to add Space Before Paragraph, for example, or to tweak your rules—double-click on the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel and edit away.

Highlighted run-in heads
Creating the green run-in heads uses a similar technique, but you use a character style instead of a paragraph style. And instead of using a paragraph rule, you use the InDesign underline controls, which can be applied to individual characters.

Start by selecting the text you want to convert into a run-in heading, open the Character Styles panel (Type>Character Styles), and choose New Character Style from the panel’s flyout menu. Again, give it a name and enable the Apply Style to Selection and Preview checkboxes. Now click Underline Options from the list on the left. (You can also use Strikethrough Options—it doesn’t matter.)

Enable the Underline On checkbox and select a Weight, Offset, and Color as you did with the paragraph rules. When you have what you want, click OK to create the character style. It can be a little difficult to see what you’re doing because of competition from the text highlight onscreen, but it’s easy enough to make adjustments by editing the style to get things just so.

Because the width of the “colored zone” you’ve created is keyed to the width of the text, your only option for making the bar wider is to add spaces before and after your heading text. Do this by placing your cursor before your text and going to Type>Insert White Space>Nonbreaking Space (Fixed Width), and then place your cursor after your text and use the same command.

Unlimited variations

By tinkering with other options in these dialogs—notably the Line Styles and the Gap Color—you can create a huge variety of effects for use with or without text. By assigning [None] as a text color, you can create character- and paragraph-based rules that are strictly decorative and have no apparent relationship to any text around them.

Rules may be rules, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with them.

Justification controls have traditionally determined to what extent a program can alter spaces between characters and words—squeeze them, stretch them—when fitting type into lines. The goal is to create the most even and consistent spacing possible among lines and paragraphs by allowing the program to find optimal places to end lines, either at word spaces or after certain punctuation marks (such as the em dash), or by hyphenating words.

Glyph scaling
InDesign has added another variable however: It can also flex the width of the characters themselves. Adobe calls this glyph scaling, and it can help the program find more of those optimal line-breaking locations, avoiding the reliance on unsightly stretching or squeezing of spaces. After all, there are as many characters on a line as there are character spaces, so the cumulative effect of tiny, undetectable adjustments to character widths can yield big results. But there’s a catch: You have to keep the alterations to a character width small enough so they’re invisible. Here’s an example of what can happen when those variations are allowed to get too large.

Misusing glyph scaling control, creates lines of type with starkly contrasting character widths.

The designer of this French election brochure was looking for a way to solve a common type composition problem: Relatively large type (12-point, in this case) set with justified margins over a narrow measure (13.5 picas). Some of these lines contain only two or three word spaces, and there just aren’t enough character spaces to allow the program to fit the type without making some lines look too crowded or too spaced out. The typical result in such situations is inconsistent type color, with loose lines looking too pale and tight ones too dark. In our example, the designer tried to help the situation by choosing to let character widths be flexed as well, but got carried away.

At first glance, it’s the inconsistent type color that catches your eye. The second, third, and fourth lines, for example, look particularly tight and dark. But in fact, this effect isn’t caused principally by variations in spacing, but by variations in character width. This example shows a closer look. After the first line, the rounded characters (look at “o” and “e”) get progressively more compressed, until by the fourth line the type looks like it came from a different typeface, a condensed member of the same family. This isn’t a pretty sight. And ironically, in addition to distorting the type, the strategy fails to fix the fundamental problem of type color varying from one line to the next.

Variations in the shapes of the round characters are striking, as though several typefaces were used for the same paragraph.

Justification dialog
The damage here was done in the Justification dialog, accessed via the Paragraph panel’s (Type>Paragraph) flyout menu. The justification values shown here is my recipe for the composition problem at hand. (The best solution begins with reducing the size of the type by at least half a point, but that’s another issue.) Over such a narrow measure, I’d allow InDesign fairly generous ranges in which it could flex word and character spaces. But more importantly, I’d keep the glyph scaling range small, normally not more than plus or minus (+/–) 1%.

These justification settings allow the wide leeway for the flexing of word and character spacing necessary for composing text over a narrow measure. To protect the integrity of the type design, glyph scaling should always be strictly limited.

This example shows two lines of type whose character widths vary by 1%, and apart from the relative line lengths, there’s virtually no difference between the appearances of the type in each line.

The top line is set in normal Officina Sans, while the bottom line has had its character widths reduced by 1%.

Line-ending possibilities
Ultimately, glyph scaling works best in lines with many characters. In such lines, the compound effect of all those tiny width adjustments can allow InDesign to find line-ending possibilities that don’t require spaces to be distorted too much. This means a line could end without a hyphen, or that a hyphen could be inserted at a more felicitous place (demon-stration, for example, instead of de-monstration). But even in narrow columns, it can make an important contribution in reducing apparent spacing variations from line to line.

To successfully use glyph scaling, the trick—as with so many type tools in InDesign—is moderation. All things, you could say, in their measure.

Some faces, for example, are simply small in the body, as the typographic expression goes. In the era of metal type, this referred to how large the character images of a given font were in relation to the metal block—the body—they were cast on. Those blocks are gone, but digital characters are still drawn in an equivalent standard space based on the em square. This em square is essentially a canvas on which the type designer works, and these days its width and height are divided into increments of 1/1000. While the width of that canvas may vary according to the width of individual characters (the Q is 823 units wide), its height always remains the same, a full 1,000 units. Encoded within each digital font is the relative location of the baseline, so programs can assure that all the type on a line base-aligns even though the font or point size may change along the way.

In a font-editing program, this Q sits in a bounding box 1,000 units tall, like all its fellow characters. At 832 units wide, the Q’s width is unique.

Although the canvas for drawing characters may be standard, how much space those characters take up is not. In this example, all the samples are set at the same point size. The most petite of the faces shown is Perpetua, which by any standard is small in the body. By comparison, Trump Medi¦val ranges to the other end of the spectrum.

All of these alphabets are set in the same size. Trump sets almost 30% larger than Perpetua; to make Perpetua appear the same size as 18-point Trump, it has to be set at more than 23 points.

Apart from perhaps having to be set in larger sizes to be comfortably readable—especially over wide measures—faces that are small in the body may also need relatively less leading than larger faces.

The top sample here, set in Centaur, seems generously leaded, but it’s set solid: 11 on 11. To get a similar spacing feel, the Stempel Garamond sample below it gets another point-and-a-half of lead: 11 on 12.5.

One very practical impact of all of this is that you can’t define a page grid until you’ve chosen a typeface. A baseline grid that will work well for Centaur will not suffice for Palatino.

The x factor

Complicating your choice of leading value is the x-height of the face, which is a measure of the height of its nonascending lowercase letters. Faces with small x-heights tend to give the appearance of a lot of white space between lines of text. Conversely, faces with tall x-heights tend to make conventional leading values look insufficient because they cheat into the normally empty space between lines.

A lesser cause of the apparent size of type is the height of its tall characters: its cap height and ascender height—the heights of characters such as “l” and “f.” This is simply because there aren’t as many ascending characters in text as there are x-high characters. Cap heights—the heights to which capital letters range—tend to be proportional to ascender height, although in some faces these two are quite different. Ultimately, you can only lead type as tightly as cap and ascender height will allow before the tall characters on one line collide with descending characters (“g,” “j,” etc.) on the preceding line.

Although Goudy Old Style (left) and Times New Roman (right) have virtually identical cap and ascender heights, Times looks bigger because of its larger x-height.

Role players

The roles typefaces were designed to play also help determine their apparent size. Times New Roman, for example, appears slightly bulky for its size because it was designed for newspaper use. It has a relatively tall x-height for its somewhat crimped width because it was designed to save space and compose well across narrow margins. But these characteristics make it a dismal choice for book work. Popular book faces, by contrast, are typically smaller in the body but with more generous character widths that are well adapted to wide book columns. In the narrow columns of magazines and newspapers, they fare badly.

Similarly, the proportions of characters—and their resulting apparent size variations—can also come from efforts to design faces for use in specific size ranges. In metal types, it was common for each point size to have a slightly different cut, with the smallest sizes being broader, bolder, and with taller x-heights than those used for body text. Text faces, in turn, were sturdier and more generously spaced than those used for display purposes.

This practice is just taking hold in digital fonts. For example, certain fonts from Adobe now include so-called “opticals,” which are typeface variations designed for different point-size ranges. These variations tend to be far less dramatic than the ones used in metal type of yore. This example shows the difference, using classified ads in so-called agate type: 5.5-point type, set 14 lines to the inch.

Two very different approaches to reproportioning type for use in small point sizes: On top, Times New Roman is almost illegible at classified ad size, but its Small Text complement is radically wider with much a taller x-heights. The difference between Arno Pro Regular and Arno Pro Caption (below) is far more subtle.

Modern trends

Contemporary styles in type tend toward larger x-heights than in the past. Although arguments are made in favor of this on readability grounds, it’s more a matter of taste. One place where larger x-heights do matter is on webpages and text made to be read onscreen. In these cases, smaller x-heights may mean that text-size type is rounded down an extra pixel or two when rendered for the screen, making for pinched characters and harder reading in general.

For type destined for print, though, readability hinges on your ability to take the face of your choice and set it well. In this, there’s no one size that fits all.

Setting type should be a creative effort, but too often it’s a tedium of repetitive formatting: roman to italic, italic to bold, up a point size, down a point size—mind-numbing stuff that eats up your day. Spare yourself: Nested styles in InDesign are a great time saver, reducing complex formatting tasks to a single mouse click.

You may already use character and paragraph styles for applying many type specs at the same time, but nested styles—character styles embedded within paragraph styles—allow for real automation. In this example, the listings are set up to be formatted using just two paragraph styles. Despite all the typographic variations, all the text was formatted with only two mouse clicks: one for the two-part heading, and one for the museum listings. The same technique could be applied to a table of contents, an index, or catalog—any place where the text structure is repetitive and predictable.

Styles within styles

InDesign lets you create styles based on text you’ve already formatted. For the main heading of our sample listing, the Character panel was used to switch “Art” (originally in caps and lowercase) to caps and small caps and to select Warnock Pro as the font. It was then colored red using the Swatches panel. The subheading, “Museums and Galleries,” was set in a smaller-size, semibold type.

To create a new character style, place the text cursor in the first line of text, then from the Character Styles panel’s flyout menu, choose New Character Style. In the dialog, name the Style “Section Heading” and click OK. InDesign creates a new style based on that text’s formatting—easy! Then, create a second character style in the same way for the subheading text (ingeniously named “Section Subheading” here).

Simple enough, but now comes the clever bit. Instead of separating the heading and subheading with a Return, use a forced line break—Shift-Return—which puts the subheading on its own line without making it into a new paragraph. Now, you can create a single paragraph style to format both lines. From the Paragraph Styles flyout menu, select New Paragraph Style and give it a name (we called ours “Section Head”). If your cursor is still in the target text, all of that text’s paragraph formatting—disallowing hyphenation, for example—will be applied to the new style. Of course, you can override any specification you want by selecting paragraph attributes from the list on the left side of the dialog (shown here).

Select Drop Caps and Nested Styles from the list on the left, then click on the New Nested Style button. Click on [None] under Nested Styles to display all available character styles in a drop-down menu and select Section Heading. Clicking “through” makes another drop-down menu available, where you can choose between “through” and “up to.” The two fields to the right make the meaning of these options more apparent. “Through” lets you specify a number of characters, sentences, or any of a slew of optional signposts in your text as the end point for the style you’ve chosen. When InDesign comes to the signpost you’ve indicated, that style yields—after the signpost—to the next nested character style on the list. Alternatively, choosing “up to” causes that signpost feature to get the following style. In this case, we wanted the formatting of “Art” to end after one line, so we set that nested-style entry to read “Section Heading through 1 Forced Line Break.” This allows the new style to work for any other listing heading, no matter how many words it contains.

Although it’s not obvious from the options in that “signpost” field, when the field is selected you can type in any character and that will become the marker that triggers the style change. (Later in this example, we’ll variously use punctuation marks, as well as line endings, to trigger the changes.)

Click on the New Nested Style button again, and create a new entry that reads “Section Subheading through 1 Forced Line Break.” This has the effect of telling InDesign to use that character format until the end of the paragraph.

With a click on OK, a single paragraph style has been created that can format both the heading and subheading at the same time. With the text cursor anywhere in those two lines, a click on Section Head in the Paragraph Styles panel completely formats both.

The second paragraph format is for the museum listings themselves. From creating the first paragraph style, you can see that a key to nested styles is having predictable signposts in the text that trigger the onset of successive styles. If you look at the first listing’s text, you can see that the first character style (the heading) ends with a forced line break; the second ends after the closing parenthesis of the phone number; the next ends after a period at the end of the opening hours; and so forth. Each of these uniquely formatted entities gets its own character style. This lets you script the sequence of nested styles quite easily, using the same technique used for the Section Head (including ending the heading with a forced line break, not a Return).

But there’s a complication: The listings themselves contain an unpredictable number of exhibits, apparently making it impossible to create a single script of style changes that works for all of them. But InDesign has an ace in the hole, which keeps you from having to create unique styles for such non-conforming paragraphs.

You can use the [Repeat] operator in a series of nested styles. When InDesign has worked through the prescribed sequence of styles and hits the [Repeat] command, it loops back however many steps you specify and starts again. In our example, this allows any number of exhibit listings and their schedules to appear one after the other, and as long as their text is identically structured, they’ll be formatted properly. This continues until the end of the paragraph.

The problem with the [Repeat] command is that you can’t add any other style after it. You have to plan things so it can be the last step in your nested style sequence, running until the paragraph ends.

Troubleshooting Tips

Sometimes applying styles produces unexpected results. This is usually due to some default formatting that’s being applied behind the scenes, which needs to be stripped out. If your styles aren’t behaving properly, select all your text and apply the character style [None] and the paragraph style [Basic Paragraph]. This will blotto any residues of existing styles or other overrides (which is what InDesign calls settings made in addition to those applied by styles). It leaves you with a blank slate to test your styles.

The logic of nested styles may be elusive at first, but once you’ve caught on, you’ll have a very powerful tool in your hands. It’s up to you to decide what to do with all the time you save.

There are three kinds of dashes: hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. The first two of these are often used incorrectly as stand-ins for minus signs, so we’ll draw that math operator into the discussion as well.

Dashes are nearly always set “closed up”; without any space before or after. A couple of exceptions are noted below, but in other cases you’re free to adjust kerning before and after dashes.

What does a hyphen do?
Hyphens play two roles: They link words in compound constructions and mark the division of single words at the end of a line. That’s all! The only time you see a hyphen followed by a space is in construction such as “pre- and post-manufacturing waste.” A hyphen should never appear at the beginning of a line, although you often see this on webpages because browsers have such poor type composition engines.

There are two kinds of hyphens: hard and soft. A hard hyphen is one you type from the keyboard and it’s a permanent part of the text stream. A soft, or discretionary, hyphen appears only when needed; for example, when your word processor or typesetting program is composing type, it inserts soft hyphens where words have to be divided at the end of a line. If the text re-rags, those hyphens disappear.

If you want to coax a line to break at a certain point—to create a better rag, for example, or to hyphenate a word your program doesn’t recognize—you can insert a soft hyphen yourself. In InDesign, the keyboard command for a soft hyphen is Command-Shift-– (PC: Ctrl-Shift-–). Note: You can also choose Type>Insert Special Character>Hyphens and Dashes to place a soft hyphen, but that’s too much work.

Don’t use a hard hyphen to force a word to divide because if the text reflows, that hyphen will reflow with it, appearing someplace you don’t want it. This is a very common mistake.

What’s an en dash?
The en dash is one en—that is, half an em—wide. Its job is always to connect. Use en dashes for a range of numbers, such as “pages 46–52” or “the years 1227–1308.” They’re also used like hyphens in compound constructions that would otherwise need multiple hyphens. For example, instead of “pre-Revolutionary-War years,” you’d use a single en dash to indicate the compound modifier: “pre–Revolutionary War years.”

To set an en dash, type Option-– (PC: Alt-0150 using the numeric keypad).

En dashes, like hyphens, are always set closed up. And while an en dash can end a line, it shouldn’t start one. Most text-processing software takes care of this automatically, but you can run afoul of the rule when breaking lines manually.

And the em dash?
Em dashes are a full em wide, and as such, many people find them too big. Nevertheless, they have a specific role to play—to separate—and this explains their size. They’re used in a manner similar to parentheses, to separate one thought from another or to insert an aside into the middle of a sentence, as in the previous sentence. Despite their grammatical role of separating, typographically speaking, they’re often referred to as “joining em rules.”

To set an em dash, type Shift-Option-– (PC: Alt-0151). Em dashes can end or start a line.

In most text typefaces, em dashes have no side bearings, which make them appear very close to the words they separate. If this bugs you, feel free to add some kerning space around them, but don’t add too much. (To judge if the em dash in a given typeface has side bearings, place the text cursor next to the dash and see if there’s a small gap between the cursor and the dash.) The maximum space I’d recommend in these cases is a hair space (Type>Insert White Space>Hair Space). Or you can just manually kern open a small gap before and after the dash.

Note: An en dash flanked by word spaces isn’t a good substitute for an em dash. It does create a break between words that’s an em wide (a word space being a quarter of an em wide) but the dash looks too wimpy floating in all that space.

There’s also a character called a “punctuating em dash” that’s slightly shorter than a normal em dash and with generous side bearings. Unfortunately, it’s rarer than hen’s teeth; it deserves to be more popular. True type maniacs can fake a punctuating em dash by adding two hair spaces before and two after an em dash and then using the Horizontal Scale tool in the Character panel to decrease the em dash’s width to 75%.

Here’s an example of a typeface where the em dashes have no side bearings, so they hew closely to the characters around them. For more generous spacing, you can use—or, more likely, create—a punctuating em dash. Make sure you select only the em dash to avoid resizing the hair spaces as well. Nice effect and a major hassle, this is only for the devout type lover.

Minus signs
The minus sign is a distinct character with its own width and weight. There’s no substitute for a proper minus sign. In our example, the top sample uses a hyphen—too short; the middle one uses an en dash—close, but badly spaced; and the bottom one—just right—is the hyphen character.

The hyphen exists in nearly all text fonts, including old PostScript Type 1, but Adobe applications make it hard to access. To find it, open the Glyphs panel (Type>Glyphs), and in the Show pop-up menu, select Math Symbols. You can’t miss it—it’s the only one that looks like a minus sign.

If you don’t see the hyphen there, it doesn’t exist in that font; but you can make sure it displays in the rank of Recently Used glyphs across the top of the panel from a font that does contain that glyph. Alternatively, you can add it to a custom Glyph Set that you can create from the Glyphs panel menu. Having a custom glyph set of similar, hard-to-find characters will save you lots of time later on.

Problems on the Web
Websites tend to use lowest–common denominator (note that en dash) HTML code for compatibility with all browsers and all computers. For this reason, webpages may display many so-called “special” characters incorrectly. Unfortunately, this includes en and em dashes as well as minus signs.

Most Web designers have come to avoid these troublesome characters, so it has become standard, sorry practice in text destined for the Web to substitute hyphens for en dashes and to use double hyphens (–) for em dashes. Minus signs are typically faked using hyphens. These are old typewriter conventions, dating to the days when the only characters you could type were those printed on the keyboard (plus lowercase letters a–z [another en dash!]).

Some day this will get squared away—when all computer systems are Unicode savvy—but that day hasn’t arrived yet.

Each cell is effectively its own text frame. Adjoining cells are stuck to each other (you can’t open up gutters between them, as in traditional typeset tables) but they have no “knowledge” of the typographic specs applied to their neighbors. Each cell is an “island,” and one cell’s leading isn’t related to or dependent on that of cells above or below it. It can become a huge hassle to control—even to know the value of—the leading between text in one cell and the text in cells above or below it. Ditto for rules added between rows. When Adobe decided to model its tables on spreadsheets, it made managing leading a headache.

Take it from the top

To control the leading between the first text line in a cell and the cell’s top border, go to the Table>Cell Options>Text dialog. Here, in the Offset drop-down menu under the heading First Baseline, you can position that first baseline in several ways: according to its Leading, Cap Height, Ascent (ascender height), x Height, or an arbitrary Fixed value. Only the Leading and Fixed options allow you to know what the leading is between the first line and the top of the cell. Stick to one of these two.

The leading between the bottom of the cell and the last text line in it can only be managed via the Bottom field under the Cell Insets heading in the same dialog. If you choose zero, the last text line’s baseline will coincide with the bottom of the cell. Any descending characters—y, for example—will dangle into the cell below. This is weird, but at least you know exactly what the leading is between cell border and text: zero.

When leading isn’t leading

Let’s take a look at the practical consequences of this hybrid approach to vertical spacing: half managed with leading values, half with cell insets.

If you use no rules between column rows (or no color fills to distinguish one row from another), things are pretty logical. With Leading selected as your First Baseline Offset option and no Top or Bottom Cell Insets, the leading between the last text line of one cell and the first text line in the cell below it will be what you’ve chosen for your text. Simple and sensible. Using leading alone (with no cell insets) to space a table, however, yields odd results, with the last line of type in each cell resting on the lower cell border. And descending characters dangle into the row below.

Example using leading alone to space a table

But if you want to add extra leading between those cells, you can’t do it by adjusting the leading itself, which is a text attribute. Instead, you have to do it by altering cell attributes. Whether you choose to do this by adding an inset or by using the Fixed option in the First Baseline Offset drop-down menu in the Cell Options dialog, you’re applying an object attribute, not a text attribute. As with text frames, trying to add “space before” or “space after” as a paragraph attribute has no effect on the top or bottom line of text in a table cell.

So, while leading is a text spec, inset spacing is a cell attribute. Creating styles to speed table formatting requires you to consider spacing in two different places, and this begs mistakes.

The “law of rules”

Things take a bad turn when you want to set rules between table rows or add colors to them, because this makes the cell boundaries visible. Unless you add insets to the bottoms of all the cells in the table, their contents will appear too low, crashing into the rules or dangling out of the colored row highlights.

InDesign should have a control that says, “Position the lower cell border in proportion to the leading used for the first baseline.” This would add enough space between the last text line in the cell and the lower cell boundary, visually centering the cell’s text block between the top and bottom cell borders.

Instead, you have to manage the spacing yourself. Now, typefaces vary in their vertical positioning characteristics, but a rule of thumb is that if the space between the last text baseline in the cell and the cell border equals half the text leading, the text block will appear vertically centered. Do this manually with cell insets, streamlining things by adding that value to a cell style.

InDesign correctly reckons the leading between the first line of type in a cell and any rule applied to the cell border above it. That is, it measures from the baseline of the type to the baseline of the rule, which is its bottom edge. This is in accordance with the way these things have historically been measured.

But now we collide with a cruel reality of the PostScript imaging model that InDesign uses to set rules. Traditional phototypeset rules act like their original metal versions. They’re construed as solid and, regardless of their thickness, their bottom edges are treated as their baselines. Not so in PostScript Land. There, lines are essentially paths, vectors: expressions of direction that have trajectory but no width. Only when stroked do they become visible on a printed page; so a 4-pt stroke yields a 4-pt rule. But these rules are built outward from each side of the path—like the dotted line that runs down the middle of a street, with the pavement “stroked” outward on either side of it.

This looms large at the bottom of a cell that has rules applied to it because, while InDesign will correctly position the top line of text according to the leading in effect, it won’t do the same for the bottom. That’s because bottom cell insets aren’t measured from the baseline of the type to the rule (or to the baseline of the rule) but from the path underlying the rule. You always end up measuring not to the edge of the rule, but to its center.

So let’s say you had set a 6-pt offset between the last line of type and the bottom of the cell before you specified any cell rules. Now if you apply a 4-pt rule to that cell, your bottom inset will be reduced by half the weight of the rule. The offset to the path of the cell border remains the same, but the visible gap between type and rule is made smaller. You have to manually add 2 points to the bottom offset to compensate.

In the example below, text is leaded at 9 points as usual in the Control panel. Then it’s off to the Table>Cell Options>Text dialog, where the first baseline in each cell gets an extra point of lead as a Fixed First Baseline Offset cell attribute. The last line gets a Bottom Cell Inset of 6.5 points: 4.5 points to space it from the cell border plus another 2 points to compensate for the 4-point rule that bounds the cell. The paths of those rules are shown here.

Simple table, complex leading

The net effect

All of these Byzantine workings can be sorted out and ultimately you can have precise numeric control over the leading of everything in a table. These values, in turn, can be built into character, paragraph, and cell styles to make formatting faster and more consistent. But they can make refining the layout of a table a hair-pulling event, because there’s no one place, no one dialog, where you can specify everything. Careful proofreading is a must. And patience is the order of the day.

Script faces

For example, very few script faces can be set in all caps. Most just weren’t designed to be used this way, and some of the more exotic forms used for script capitals can be unrecognizable without the accompaniment of more familiar lowercase forms to provide some context. Exceptions to the rule are faces such as Impress and Dom Casual, which were designed as advertising faces and derive from the kind of lettering—often in all caps—that you see in hand-painted supermarket signage.

Joining script faces

So-called joining script faces—whose characters actually connect—are the trickiest to deal with, even though they’d seem to all but eliminate the use of most of your typographic armaments, such as spacing adjustments. Roundhand faces, which imitate elegant formal handwriting, are a good example of joining faces. The connections between characters in these faces effectively make the entire word a single ligature, which means that you can’t adjust their tracking very much, if at all. If their spacing gets too loose, the letters disconnect; if you tighten tracking too much, adjoining characters will overlap instead of merely abutting. For the same reason, you can never set joining scripts with justified margins—the stretching and squeezing needed to fill justified lines will make hash out of these faces’ carefully calibrated spacing.

Consequently, there’s no need to kern lowercase characters in joining script faces. On the other hand, you’ll almost always need to kern the spaces between capitals and the lowercase characters that follow them (shown in this album cover). Because all the lowercase characters connect, the gaps after capital letters look extra large, as seen in Prokofiev’s name. Romeo and Juliet were thoughtful enough to have initial caps that have connecting forms, at least in the face used here, Embassy.

Before ©COLORBYTES 1992

after kerning type

The often loopy, flamboyant forms of script faces also oblige you to look for spacing problems in places you’d normally ignore, such as around the ampersand in the album cover type. The swerving shape of the Embassy ampersand makes it appear to lean away from Romeo and reach out to tickle Juliet. Restoring typographic decorum demands kerning the ampersand away from the latter and toward the former. You don’t normally have to worry about kerning against word spaces, but in script settings it happens all the time. Script faces play by their own rules and we’re all obliged to follow along.

Get that calligraphic slant

Most typeset characters are content to contain themselves within the bounds of the normal em square in which they’re constructed, but not joining script characters. To get that calligraphic slant and have all the characters “link hands,” one character has to overlap the next. Here, we’ve selected a single character to highlight the bounding box of such script characters and show how peculiar the spacing of these faces really is.

Snell Roundhand (top) and Lucia (bottom) samples

For a joining script face, the inclined characters have been constructed to overlap each other in order to connect. Because typesetting programs align characters at the margin according to the edges of their bounding boxes, tricky alignment issues arise in flush-left or -right settings. In midline, this overreaching doesn’t have much practical impact for the typesetter, but at either end of the line, this method of constructing characters can affect margin alignments.

Typeface designers have two possible strategies when it comes to accomplishing this overlapping. For example, Snell Roundhand (the top sample) could be called left-handed because the overhanging parts of its characters occur on the left side of their bounding boxes. By contrast, Lucia (the bottom sample) is right-handed: The overhanging parts of its characters extend beyond the right-hand side of the bounding box. Both accomplish the same end, but with the result that Snell will hang out beyond the left-hand margin when it starts a line, and Lucia can be a struggle to align flush-right if a line ends with a character (such as one with an ascender) that leans far out of its bounding box. In such cases, you’ll be obliged to manipulate the horizontal position of such lines using left and right indents to get them to appear properly aligned.

Lastly, most roundhand script faces don’t work well in small sizes. Many of these faces started life as engraver’s faces and were never meant to be used in tiny sizes. In computer settings, they become spindly as their point size decreases, and any kind of competition with the background (tints and patterns, for example) makes them very hard to read. Even in the large sizes used in the sample album cover, I chose to stroke the characters in black to give them some contrast against their busy photographic background. Reversed script type (set white on black) in small sizes tends to break up, as the black ink invades the super thin strokes. In this, they’re like italics, only worse!

From the days of the first incised cuneiform tablets, text has been written—then printed—in straight lines. Our whole system of page layout, of text composition, of the shapes of the alphabet’s characters themselves, assumes a straight, horizontal baseline. Computers may have liberated us from the tyranny of the straight line, but they haven’t freed us from the laws of legibility and readability. Getting loopy type to look good isn’t automatic.

The most obvious problem when type goes nonhorizontal—even on a straight baseline—is that you have to turn your head to read it. This turns out to have cultural dimensions, as European readers—who are accustomed to reading the spine type on books in a library from bottom to top—are more comfortable reading type going “uphill” than Americans, whose habit of reading spine type from top to bottom makes them more comfortable reading type going “downhill.”

The greatest challenge
But that’s really a design issue. From a typographical point of view, curving baselines mount the greatest challenge, because in addition to head-craning readability issues, curving baselines wreak havoc on the spacing between characters. In the InDesign Type>Type on a Path>Options dialog, you can control how a line of type cleaves to a path. Here you can do a lot of clever and mostly useless things—tricks you may use once but that generally don’t bear repeating. These include all of the choices in the Effects pop-up menu, except for Rainbow, which is the one we’ll talk about here. When using Rainbow, the effect is like bowing a normal baseline, with the stems of the characters rising from it at right angles.

Stick to Align: Center for decent character spacing

The most important choices in the Type on a Path Options dialog are in the Align and To Path drop-down menus. In Align, you can opt to have your type stand up on the path (the Baseline option), hang down below the path (Ascender) or above the path (Descender), or have the path pass right through the centerlines of the characters (Center). Characters standing on the path have normal spacing where they meet the baseline, but their tops get bunched up on concave baselines and spread too far apart on convex baselines. When you choose to have the ascenders align with the path, spacing at the baseline of the characters closes up on convex baselines and spreads apart on concave baselines. The results in all of these cases are bad. You’ll get the most natural character spacing if you select Center from the Align menu and, if necessary, Center from the To Path menu.

Here, the top sample shows type that’s set base-aligned to an elliptical path. In the sharpest parts of the curve, character spacing is badly distorted. The middle sample is set top-aligned with the curve, which badly pinches the bottoms of the characters in the tight convex curves. At the bottom is the happy medium: vertically centering the type on the curved path. Using baseline shift to raise the text a couple of points relative to the path improves spacing even more.

Note: The To Path menu only comes into play when the path your type is following has been stroked, that is, given width and color; otherwise, it has no top, center, or bottom to align to.

Better overall spacing
Even if you use Align: Center, you’ll still have to do some hand kerning—and possibly some tracking adjustments—where the curves of the path are the sharpest. But there will be far less mopping up to do than with any other alignment option.

Another trick to assure better overall spacing is using the Baseline Shift control in the Control panel to make micro adjustments to the type’s alignment relative to the path. Just make sure you have all of the text selected before adjusting this value. Raising the type a couple of points above where the Center command places it can provide substantially more natural spacing, even in tight corners.

It’s inevitable that in tight bends, your type will get looser or tighter, depending on whether the bend is concave or convex. In these places, use your tracking controls to tighten or loose the overall spacing of words or phrases to establish an even spacing feel throughout the whole text passage. Even after adjusting tracking, some hand kerning will likely be needed.

Choosing the typeface
Lastly, the typeface you choose for arcing type makes a big difference in its final look. In general, sans-serif faces fare better than serif faces; all caps text (because the letters have a consistently blockier profile) fare better than caps and lowercase; and condensed or compressed faces tend to look better than those with a wide set width. Script faces may work on gradual curves, but those with interconnecting letters can either become disconnected or have their connection points overlap—not a pretty thing. Brush faces fare best because their characters are generally not designed to connect, and their calligraphic style gives you more flexibility with their spacing—every little kern isn’t as crucial.

Brush faces and nonconnecting scripts work particularly well on curved baselines, as shown here. Their irregular geometry hides some spacing flaws, and this sample needed only light kerning. Serif faces in particular need more kerning to get character spacing to look something like normal.