From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Applying advanced character formatting - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

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Applying advanced character formatting

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- [Man] In an earlier chapter, we looked at the basics of character formatting, including setting the font, size, and leading. Now, let's look at a few more important character styling options that you have. I have the Type tool selected, and I'm going to come down here and select this heading inside this text frame. Then, let's zoom in to 400% by pressing command or control four. Now, you remember that leading changes the spacing between lines of text, right? But what about changing the spacing between individual characters? I'm going to go up to the control panel and I want to make sure I'm in character formatting mode. That's the button with the little A on it. And now, let's take a look at these two pop-up menus over here. The first one on top is Kerning, and Kerning lets you adjust the amount of space between two letters on a line. The second one is called Tracking. Tracking is the same as Kerning, but it goes across a range of text. In fact, some people call Tracking "Range Kerning." And technically, they are both doing the same thing, adjusting the amount of space between characters. But again, you usually use Kerning for just two characters at a time and Tracking for more text. In this case, let's say we want to make the whole line tighter or looser. You can do that to the selected line by using the Tracking field. I'll just choose the pop-up menu and choose a value here, like fifty. That opens it up a little. Now, to the left of those fields are some buttons that make the characters look different, like Superscript or Small Caps. Here, let's click this first one. You can see this makes the text look like all caps. Under the hood, it's still upper and lower case, but it shows up as all caps here. There are a number of other character formatting attributes that you'll probably never use in here. Or perhaps, should never use. Like over here in the middle of the panel, this field here, that's the Skew or Shear field. And right now it's set to zero degrees. But if we set this to say, 15 and hit return or enter, you can see that it skews, or shears the text to the right. It almost looks italic. But this is not a true italic. This is a fake italic. Some people call it oblique. If you have a real italic version of your font, you should use that instead. Oh, back to these buttons. Here's a feature that you almost certainly will use sometime. The Underline Style. That's this T with an underscore. Let's click that. The problem is the default underscore is usually kind of clunky. Fortunately, InDesign gives you some controls over how the underline should look. Now you can find those controls in a couple of places. First, if we move all the way over to the right side of the control panel, there's a little menu button. I'll click in that and here's what we're looking for. Underline Options. But the truth is, I don't usually choose Underline Options from this menu, and that's because it's easier to just hold down the option key, or alt on Windows, and then click on that underline button. That forces InDesign to show me all of the options. We can see that the Underline On checkbox is turned on here in the dialogue box. Now, let's go ahead and change this to something different. For example, let's change the color to something, how 'about this kind of dark pink color? Also, we can make this thicker, maybe two points, and even change the style. I'll choose this wavy line style down here. I should also change the Offset. That's how far away from the baseline, the bottom of the text, that the stroke is going to set. I'll choose two points as well. Now, let's click okay. And I'll click off here so we can see the result. Well, we've looked at a lot of different formatting options and we've really only scratched the surface of what you can do with character level formatting. In the next movie, we'll look at how you can search for, and more importantly, change all the fonts in your document.

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