From the course: InDesign Secrets

286 How to format ellipses - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

286 How to format ellipses

“

- [Instructor] An ellipses, like this character here, is a symbol that indicates that something is omitted, or missing, or sometimes it's used to indicate a long pause in dialog. I think my love of the ellipses character comes from reading Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett plays, where the symbol is almost like a word all by itself. But the problem is that typing an ellipses is easy, but making it look right is not. There are several ways to make a really good ellipses. You might know that you can type an ellipses character by holding down the Option key on the Mac, or Alt on Windows, and then hitting the Semicolon key. But look at that ellipses character, it's all bunched up together, like a rodent hiding in a corner. So yes, technically that works, but I much prefer to build a real ellipses, something that looks attractive on the page. So the trick to an ellipses is that you need to use a combination of dots or periods, and the right kind of white spaces. Let me show you how. I'll double click on this type frame to switch to the text tool, and then I'll delete that ellipses, and also the space after it. Now I'm going to head up to the Type menu and come all the way down to the Insert White Space submenu. In here, I'm going to choose Nonbreaking Space Fixed Width. I want it to be fixed width, because I don't want the spaces around the ellipses to change and justify text. That is, I don't want some to be wider and some to be narrower. And I want it to be nonbreaking because I don't want my ellipses to start at the beginning of the line, or to break apart across the line. I aways want the whole thing stuck to the previous word. Now, if in your document design you don't mind the ellipses beginning at the beginning of the sentence, then you might want to choose a different space instead. Like a quarter space, or maybe a sixth space. But in this case, I'm going to be using a nonbreaking space fixed width. Next, I'm going to type a dot, or the period character. Now I want to repeat that. The space and the period. So I'm just going to select those two characters, I just did a Shift Left Arrow a couple of times to select them, and I'll copy them to the clipboard, press the right arrow, and I'll paste a few times. Now I've got one too many dots, so I'll just press the Delete key to delete that one. I'm going to head back up to the Type menu and I'm going to choose way down here at the bottom Show Hidden Characters, that way I can actually see those hidden or invisible space characters. See how these space characters that I inserted look like a blue dot with a carat over them? Well, if this text frame were on a different layer, it would be red or green or something else, but I'm on the blue layer, so these characters look blue, matching the frame edge. Anyway, that symbol, the dot with a carat over it, indicates a nonbreaking fixed width space. Now currently, I have one of those at the end of the ellipses as well, but I don't mind if the ellipses is sitting by itself at the end of a line, so I'm going to add one more character here. I'll go back to the Type menu, choose Insert Break Character, and then down at the very bottom, I'll choose Discretionary Line Break. So, there we have it. It's a nice looking ellipses with some air in it, and it'll stick with the word before it, but break at the end of the line if it needs to. Now, there are other ways to construct these of course, like you could use regular spaces, or some other kind of fixed width space, like I mentioned the quarter space. And if you want to make it a little tighter, you might even want to use thin spaces. You can play around with it using different space characters to get the look you like. But this is, all in all, a better looking ellipses. Of course, the only problem is that it's not easy to type. You don't want to have to do that every time you want to type an ellipses, right? So here's what I do. I use the regular ellipses character while I'm editing and doing the initial layout, but then, when I'm really ready to style my document, I open the Find/Change dialog box, by pressing Command F or Control F on Windows, and then inside the Find what field, I'll type my normal ellipses character, Option or Alt Semi-Colon followed by a space. And then I want to change this to a code. It looks kind of strange, but here's what you type. Carat S and then a dot. And then I repeat that. Carat S dot, carat S dot, carat S and then carat K. That carat K is the symbol for the discretionary line break. Now I know this looks weird, but it's pretty easy to remember once you do it a few times, or you can jot it on a piece of paper or something. And this just means type a nonbreaking fixed width space character, followed by a dot and so on, until that last code, which means, again, discretionary line break. So now when I click Change, it goes throughout my entire document and it replaces all of those dumb looking ellipses with pretty ones. Here I'll click Done, and you can see that it's made the change. Now let me go up to the Type menu, and I'll choose Hide Hidden Characters, and now you can see that all of those ellipses look much better. Now the reason I like InDesign so much, is that it lets me make my type look exactly the way I want, right? And creating your own custom ellipse is one way to bring your document design up to a higher level.

Contents