From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
Applying basic text formatting - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
Applying basic text formatting
- [Instructor] We've seen how you can use the type tool to get text into InDesign and edit it. Now, I want to talk about text formatting. I have my magazine file open from my exercise files folder, and I'm going to double click this frame to place the text cursor in the paragraph. Now I'll zoom in to 200% by pressing command or control two. Let's select a little bit of text here. Let's change the font. To do that, I want to set my control panel to character formatting. Right now it's at the paragraph formatting, which I can see because that little paragraph symbol is highlighted. I'll click the A icon and it changes to character formatting. Now, the first item I see on the left is the font menu. I can change the font by clicking on this little popup menu and then choosing a different one. Notice that if I hover for a moment over a font in the list, it previews the font on the page. Also, notice this little twirly triangle to the left of some of these fonts. If I click on that, I can see various styles inside that font family. I'll just click on this one. Now, the first thing I notice here is the font did change, but I'm also noticing that it's all highlighted. I'll click over here and you can see what I mean. You can see that all that text is highlighted in this light blue color. That highlighting is a warning. It won't print that way, it won't export to PDF, but InDesign is just alerting me to the fact that I'm adding formatting over and above what's called the paragraph style. I'll be talking about paragraph styles in a later chapter, but Adobe is just trying to be helpful here. In this case though, it's just confusing. So let's see how you can turn off that highlighting, if you see it. Over here in the doc on the right side of the screen, choose the paragraph styles panel. Now see this little button with an A and a plus sign? Just click that. That turns off the alert and we can see our text normally. Okay, now I can close this panel by clicking its name in the doc and get on with formatting the text. I'll select that text again, and now I'll choose a different font, but this time, instead of clicking on one, I'm going to change this text to something else. For example, I'll just type GEO and InDesign filters out all my fonts, down to the list of the ones that have those letters in them, So it guesses that I want Georgia. I can even type ITA at the end, and it guesses I want either Georgia, bold, italic, or Georgia italic. I'll choose italic. Oh, I should mention another trick here in the font menu, you can filter your list of fonts by classification. You simply open the menu and then click on this filter icon. For example, I could say, just show me my script fonts, but if you do that, be sure to later click, "Clear all" to un-filter your list, or else you'll be wondering where all your fonts went. You can also click the find more button here, and it shows you a list of all the fonts that come with Creative Cloud. And you can activate them by clicking this little cloud icon in the right column. I'm not going to do that right now, but feel free to experiment with this. Note that in InDesign, there are often many ways to do the same thing, so you can also change the font by going to the type menu up at the top of the screen. Just look inside the font sub menu. Here's all those fonts, and also there's fonts at the top of the list. Those are the fonts that I've used recently. They're all up here at the top of the list so I can use them again quickly. In this case though, I don't want to change the font again, what I want to do is change the size of this font. That's the third item in the control panel. Now, I could choose a font size out of the popup menu here, or you could simply type in the value you want. For example, I'll type 15 points and then I'll hit enter or return. The next field down is the letting field. I'll change this to say 24 points. You can see that the line spacing changes not just for the lines that contain the text that I had selected, but the entire paragraph, and that's because of the change in preferences that I made in the last movie. You can see that there are a bunch of other text formatting features in here, but I'm just going to do one more thing to this text. Let's change the color. I can do that in the control panel too. There are two widgets, here in the middle of the control panel, and they both have a little T in them. The top one is the fill color, the bottom one is the stroke color. In this case, I'm going to fill this with, say this purple color. Now it doesn't look right because the text is selected, but I'll click over here and you can see that the text is actually purple. So that's font size, letting, and color. These are all just the beginning when it comes to formatting text. In a later chapter, we're going to dive far deeper when we explore more advanced character and a paragraph styling.
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