From the course: Type Tips

Fine-tuning spacing in a text block

From the course: Type Tips

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Fine-tuning spacing in a text block

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- [Nigel] Welcome to Type Tips, I'm Nigel French. In this episode, I'd like to give you some tips on adjusting the spacing between paragraphs of different sizes. And this is in Adobe InDesign. So to start with, I'm going to select my text frame. Now because I'll be doing a lot of resizing of the type what I don't want to have happen is for the type to fall out of the frame. So I'll press Command or Control + B, or come to the Object menu and choose Text Frame Options, and then come to autosize. I'm going to autosize height only from the top. So the depth of the text frame will grow to accommodate the text. I'll also come to my general options, and I'm going to add 18 points of inset spacing. Then I'll come select the type, and, I'm going to use Tisa Pro as my typeface. Let me just change that. Coming to my alignment options, I'll choose to justify all lines. Let me zoom out a bit so we can see the original on the left as I work on the text on the right. Another thing I should mention is that, I'll be using keyboard shortcuts to size the type and to adjust the leading, and the kerning. And I want to make sure that when I do that, I'm doing it in fine increments, so I'm going to come to my Preferences, Units and Increments. I've changed this one, Size and Leading to a half point, and the kerning and tracking to one one-thousandth of an m. So I'm going to select everything and then use the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift or Control + Shift greater than to increase the size of the type, and I'm really looking to start with on line number three. I'm just going to keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, until it explodes, which is about there. At which point, I'll back up one step. This is my widest line, and this is as big as I can make it. So now I'll come to the first line and I'll do the same thing. Command + Shift + >, and we can see up here that we're increasing a half point at a time. If you did want to go in larger increments, you could also hold down the Option or Alt key, and that will go in five times that increment, or two and a half points at a time. So we go until it breaks, and then, we back up one step. Okay, I realize I need a stroke around my frame. Now watch what happens when I put the stroke on the frame. It explodes, so I could adjust the size of the type, I could adjust the size of the frame, but what I'm going to do here, let's say that everything else is just as I want it. I'm going to come to my Stroke Panel, and I'm going to choose to align the stroke to the outside so that none of the stroke weight comes inside the frame and causes my type to fall out of the text frame. Next thing I want to address is the leading. I'll select all of the type, and come to my Justification Options. Now usually I'm doing this within the context of a paragraph-style definition, but here I'm just applying it locally to this text. And I'm going to start by adjusting the leading. I'll set this to 100%. I'm using autoleading, and I know I may have said in the past don't use autoleading. Well this is an exception. In this case, I think autoleading is going to work, but I want its percentage to be less, so I'm going to set that to 100%. And then I also want to adjust these options, the word spacing, the letter spacing, and the glyph scaling. You can see that the word spaces are virtually nonexistent. That needs to be fixed, and what will help is, if we tighten up the letter spacing. Currently, there's zero letter spacing. I'm going to set the minimum, the desired, and the maximum to minus 10. So by tightening up the letter spacing, that allows the word spaces to become a little bit bigger. But I think that word space is now too big, so I'm going to set the word spacing minimum desired and maximum all to 85%. Which causes the type to explode once again, and at this point, any changes we make are likely to cause this kind of problem. If it happens, don't panic. The next thing I'm going to do is apply a modest amount of glyph scaling. The horizontal scaling of the characters, and this should fix it. So 98% minimum, desired, leave it 100%, in fact that does fix it, and I'll let the maximum go to 102%. Now the leading is okay, but that's just the starting point, so we do need to adjust it. And I'm going to take as my rule of thumb, if you will, the text inset, remember, we set that to be 18 points, so I want the spacing between the lines to be optically similar to 18 points. Something that's going to help is, returning to my Text Frame Options and to the Base Line Options, I'm changing the first base line offset to cap height, so that the top of caps goes all the way to the top of the text frame. Now I'm going to draw myself a rectangle that indicates the space between the top of the frame and the top of the caps of that first line. And I'll apply a color to this. So that's the spacing that I'm aiming for between all of the lines. I'll make a duplicate of that, and maybe make it a little bit wider. Now I'll select the second line, making sure that I'm selecting all of the type, and you might just to be on the safe side want to work with your hidden characters shown, so I've pressed W to go to my normal view mode, and I have my hidden characters shown. And when I make that selection, included in the selection is that hidden character, so that we don't get mixed formats within a paragraph. So now with this line, which is its own paragraph, selected I'll press Option or Alt and tap my Up Arrow to bring that up to the bottom of that pink rectangle, and then I'll come and make a duplicate of that down to here. Select line three, and now Option or Alt and the Down Arrow to move this down. And one more time. Move the last line down a fraction. Right, those measuring sticks have served their purpose, so we can delete those. And I think all that really remains is to adjust the kerning, and I realize, I probably should have switched to optical kerning, which I tend to prefer for display type, but it is a matter of preference. Let's see what happens when I choose optical kerning. So this is disregarding the metrics values in the font and just looking at the character shapes. I'm going to go with that, and in addition, there are a couple of spots where I want to add some manual kerning, and those are between the A and the C, and also this space here, between the f and the D. Now, if I were to stare at this longer, I'm sure I could find other places where I want to adjust the kerning, but you'll get my point here. So just insert my cursor between those two characters, and the keyboard shortcut here is Option or Alt, and the Right Arrow. As I'm doing this, this value here is changing, and if I want to go in bigger increments, I'll also hold down the Command key. I want to not make it looser but tighter, so I'm pressing Option or Alt and the Left Arrow. But here, I do want to go looser, so that's Option or Alt and the Right Arrow. Now let's just preview this, without the hidden characters. So I'll choose my selection tool, and press W to hide my guides.

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