From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Applying advanced character formatting - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Applying advanced character formatting

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- [Tutor] In an earlier chapter, we looked at the basics of character formatting, including setting the font, size and letting. 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 into 400% by pressing command or control four. Now you remember that letting changes the spacing between lines of text. 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 that I'm in the character formatting mode. That's the button with a 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 50. That opens it up at 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 sheer 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 sheers 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 some time. The underlined 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, underlying 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 underlined button. That forces InDesign to show me all the options. We can see that the underline on checkbox is turned on here in the dialog 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 could 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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