From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Applying advanced character formatting - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Applying advanced character formatting

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- [Instructor] 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 style options that you have. Let's double-click this text frame over here on the right and then select this heading. I'll zoom into 200% by pressing Command or Control + 2, and now let's apply some additional formatting to this text. You can see all the text formatting features up in the Control Panel or in the Properties Panel, but I can see that I'm in Paragraph Formatting mode, so I need to click this little A icon to switch to character formatting mode. Okay, here's the font size and leading, and you remember that leading changes the spacing between lines of text, right? But what about changing the spacing between individual characters? Well, that's controlled over here in these two features that have a little VA next to them. The first one on the top is called kerning. Kerning lets you adjust the amount of space between two letters on a line. The second one is called tracking, and tracking is the same as kerning, but it goes across a range of text. In fact, some people call tracking range kerning. Technically, they're 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. Okay, let's say we want to make the whole line tighter or looser. You can do that by changing this number or choosing a value out of this little pop-up menu. For example, let's try 25 units. That opens it up a little. Okay, now what about these T buttons a little bit to the left? These make your characters look different, like subscript, or superscript, or small caps. Here, let's try this first one. I'll click it and it makes all the texts look like it's an uppercase. Now, under the hood, it's still upper and lowercase, but it shows up as all caps here. It's just character formatting. Now, there are a number of other character formatting attributes that you'll probably never use or perhaps should never use, like here in the middle of the Control Panel. This lets you change the skew or the shear. So right now, it's set to zero degrees, but if we set this to something like 15 degrees and press Return or Enter, now 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. Now, if you have a real italic version of your font, you should use that instead. Oh, let me go back to these T buttons over here because I didn't talk about underline and strikethrough. You'll almost certainly use these sometime. Let's give this heading an underscore. So I'll click once on that button. Now, it's highlighted, so you can't see the underscore very well, but you can tell that it looks kind of clunky, right? Fortunately, we have some controls over how that underline looks. Now, let's look way over here on the right side of the Control Panel. There's a little menu. This gives you all kinds of other formatting options you should look through, including this one, Underline Options. But the truth is, I don't usually choose underline options from this menu, and that's because it's much faster to simply hold down the Option key on the Mac or Alt key on Windows and then click that button again. The Option or Alt key forces InDesign to show me all the options. We can see that the underline is turned on here in this checkbox. And now let's go ahead and change it to something different, like let's change the color. I'll choose this rose color down here. We can also make this thicker, maybe two points, and I'll change the offset. I'll change that to two points as well. The offset controls how far away from the baseline of the text the underline should sit. You can even change the style here. For example, I'll choose this wavy style down at the bottom of this pop-up menu. All right, let's click OK, and then I'll click Off here, and you can see there's all the formatting I applied. 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're going to look at how you can search for, and more importantly, change all the fonts in your document.

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