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Have you ever considered how your numbers look in your table of contents, in your tables, or in your running text? Most modern typefaces (OpenType) contains different figures for different purposes - learn to master them to make a subtle but important facelift of your design.

The most obvious figures are the lining figures and the hanging (Oldstyle) figures - lining being where the figures "stands" on the baseline with equal height, and hanging being the figures positioned relatively to the baseline and x-height.

A table of contents using proportionally spaced hanging figures.

The spacing between the figures are really important, either you choose them to be tabularly or proportionally spaced. The default setting in most modern fonts are proportionally, since it is the pretties when the figures are written in context with other text - but as soon as the figures are placed as a part of a table with many numbers, or in this case a table of content, tabular is the way to go.

The same table of contents, but with tabularly lining figures instead.

Tabular figures are always the same width, so they as illustrated are placed right on top of each others, but not as beautifully spaced next to each others.

In many fonts, this width is equal to an EN, but since this is not always the case, you in InDesign have the Figure space available, so that you in a text with many numbers on top of each others, can use figure spaces instead of word spaces to match the exact width of the figure.

Using figure spaces to indent tabular figures. Also illustrated here, the slashed zero figure.

In the previous illustration you can also see another type of figure type available in many modern fonts, the slashed zeros.

There are several ways of discovering what types of figures are available in a specific font through OpenType:

1. Check the font specimen where this always is detailed - it is of course a selling point.
2. You can check the glyph palette for alternative figures (as with stylistic sets).
3. You can open the character panel (CMD+T/CTRL+T) and check the OpenType menu item - if an option is unavailable it will be surrounded by square brackets.

The character panel with the OpenType menu open.

For instance, turning on Fractions will make sure that numbers written like 1/100 will be using a real fraction slash, and real numerators and denominators, which separately also are available in the OpenType settings for text.

A fraction with real numerators and denominators.

Be sure to also read the earlier guides in the Better typography series: The right quotation marks, Using the baseline grid, Optical alignment and Creating and organising styles.

Creating and organising styles in the beginning of a design process can be a huge help later. Many people tend to rapidly select text, change fonts, leading etc. in their design process, to prepare something to show the client. But the more designs you need to prepare, the more changes the client suggests, and the longer you get in the design process, changing even small stuff takes longer and longer. And even when the design is finally done, and you need to work with it, you will have to recreate the document and create styles from scratch.

I would like to introduce to you, how I normally create and organise my styles to first be able to rapidly change different typefaces, font sizes and leading, and in the end skip the recreation part, since all of the styles are ready to work with.

Paragraphs, headings, captions

This technique effectiveness increases by the amount of different styles/types of text. In this case the document (a book) I will keep it quite simple: normal paragraph text and three levels of headings.

Normally when working on a book I will make sure everything is locked to the baseline grid, but in the start phase I will not lock anything. Instead I will make sure, when creating the styles, that everything adds up! If I define space before and after a paragraph, I will make sure it adds up to the leading of the text. The reason? To be able to quickly test out different leading without changing the baseline grid all the time.

Style defaults

The first paragraph styles I will add are Default, Heading default and Paragraph default. I tend to name my styles quite semantically - there is no need to keep the names short and cryptic, call them something that makes sense! In this case where we don't need that many styles, creating "default" paragraph styles might be overkill, but in bigger projects it can really be a great help. I create the default styles to have something to base other styles on, inheriting all settings if not overridden. If you are used to working with HTML and CSS, you will already know the importance of being able to inherit styles, especially if the document suddenly grows and gets more complex.

The first is the Default style, where I will define everything: leading, font, justification, tabs, what type of numbers used (old style/lining), OpenType features, stylistic sets, language, composer (paragraph/single line), hyphenation rules etc.

Basing the Paragraph default on the Default style makes sure it inherits all settings from it.

Next I will create the Heading default style, basing it on the Default style, where I will change what is common for all the headings, in this case it should be a different font, since I want paragraph text in a Serif font and the headings in a Sans font.

I will also create Paragraph default, still basing it on the Default style. In my case, I don't want to change any options in this style, since it should just inherit everything from the Default style.

Paragraphs

For the normal paragraphs I am going to create 2 styles, Paragraph and Paragraph no indent, which is still semantically named and should clearly indicate "what they do". I will create both styles basing them on the Paragraph default style, but only make changes to the Paragraph style, where I will add a first line indent.

In many cases there could be several other styles created here, one with drop cap, full paragraph indented, quotation etc.

Headings

As with the normal paragraphs, I will create three styles, all basing them on the Heading default style, and call them something like Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3.

I only need to change some single things in the Heading defaults style, since the rest is inherited.

Here the only things needing changes are the size and spacing and if you want to differentiate in other ways, such as small caps etc.

Again, since the styles are based on a style it will inherit the options from the parent style, which means you wont have to set up all the small things 10 times.

The first "General" tab of a paragraph shows what is different in the current style from the style it is based on, for quick reference.

Changing the default style

Luckily InDesign is intelligent enough to "update things" for you. If you base styles on each others and change the style another style is based on, it will take effect immediately. So take it, you want to test the whole design with another font, you only need to change the Default style, and perhaps the Headings Default.

The final "invisible tree" structure, with Default in the top.

And of course, if you have created indents based on the leading and adjusted spacing above/below a paragraph, and you change the Default style's leading, you will need to adjust those too. Unfortunately InDesign doesn't support any sort of inherited units, or units based on leading/font-size like EM squares.

When done with preparing different designs with different typefaces, discussing with your client, convincing them that you are Superman etc., you only need to adjust the documents margins and baseline grids, and locking the Default style's lines to the baseline grid.

Organising in a different way?

This is my way of working with styles - and not necessarily the only right way. Are you grouping styles? Not basing them on each others? Please share!

As a follow up post to the baseline grid guide, I would like to write a little about optical alignment in InDesign. As I stated in that post, »fine tuning a grid based design is all about optical alignment - the human eye is what matters in the end«.

When we talk about typography, what better example is there than Gutenbergs 42 line bible.

Notice the optical margins in Gutenbergs beautiful Bible.

Notice the hanging characters in the columns, especially the hyphens and dots. The hyphens are optically almost none existing, so Gutenberg allowed these to "hang" outside the column, to please the human eye.

The same counts for the drop caps. Notice the left side of the Q - not the tail in perticular which is just being decorative, but the left side of the letterform itself. It is pulled just a little into the gutter to create an optical alignment with the left column edge.

I have created a small test case, take a look at this screenshot and you will step by step see an improvement of alignment:

The document without any optical alignment.

Optical margin alignment

The first thing to do, to achieve an instant better result, is activating Optical Margin Alignment. Optical margin alignment is applied per story, so just place the text marker in the story you wish to apply it for, open the Story palette, and turn it on. The leading applied is just "guiding", if the main text size is 10pt the size should be set to 10 more or less here as well. But nudge it up and down till you find it fitting!

Here you can turn on and off optical margin alignment for a story.

Since the feature is turned on per story, you might have some specific styles you dont want automatically adjusted. Adobe added a feature to ignore optical margin alignment in the paragraph style:

Let a paragraph style ignore optical margin alignment.

After this small change I am quite satisfied with the main text and the subheading alignment - notice especially dots, commas, hyphens and the left side of the A, and the Y hanging a little outside the column. It isn't perfect, but still it is way better than before!

The document with optical margin alignment turned on.

Adjusting drop caps

The drop cap is way bigger than the main text, so optical margin alignment won't really affect it that much. Instead manually adjusting it will! The same adjustments will work for bigger headers, where you want them optically aligning with the text.

First of all you have to add a normal space before the drop cap, and then adjust it to drop the first two characters instead of only one.

Adjust the drop cap to drop 2 characters.

When the drop cap is adjusted and the space is added, you are able to "track it" outside the left edge.

The drop cap with an extra space.

Just place the text marker between the dropped cap and the space you inserted and track it until it is in place. In this case I had to track by "-310".

The drop cap with aligned.

How much you align your text is up to you, but I really find the optical margin alignment tool useful. In larger projects you probably won't always have the time to finetune each heading or drop cap, but if the time is there, why not? The end result is not perfect, but quickly done. Here is a screenshot without grids:

The document with optical alignment in place.

One of the mistakes you often see in books, is that the book isn't printed "line on line". Depending on the opacity of the paper it is printed on, you can glimpse the other side of the paper through the page, and if the lines on the opposite site isn't aligned with the ones you are currently reading, it can be really frustrating and make it more difficult to read.

This is one of the reasons we use baseline grids.

By adding a baseline grid with a specific leading to your document, you can make sure that all your text is locked to that grid, and by that, assure the final result is printed "line on line".

The document

I have created a document with a specific top, bottom, inner and outer margin. My main text paragraphs are made with Meta Serif with a 10pt font size on a 13pt leading (in short terms, 10/13pt).

Since the main text paragraphs have a 13pt leading, this is the increment I will use for the baseline grid. The baseline grid is set up in Preferences » Grids.

Preferences » Grids is the place you set up your document baseline grid.

After setting up the baseline grid, I want to make sure that the margins and the text aligns. As you can see in the next image, there is a gap below the last line of the baseline grid, and the bottom margin. In this case the distance is 0.925mm, which i will I will add to the current Start value of the baseline grid, to move the whole grid a bit down on the page and align it to the bottom margin.

Adjusting the baseline grid's start level to align with the bottom margin.

Now in some cases it would be necessary to adjust the documents top margin, to make space for an extra line, but in this case it isn't necessary. If it was the case, the margin should of course be adjusted on the master pages, to affect all pages.

The styles

In this case I am using Meta Serif, 10/13pt, so the first thing I will define in the main paragraph style is the font, the font size and the leading.

The next thing I will define, is that the paragraph style should lock all lines to the baseline grid. This is done in the Indents and Spacing section. In reality, if my leading was set to 10pt, and all lines was set to lock to the baseline grid, the result would still be a 13pt leading. If the style's leading was set to 14pt though, the end result would be a leading of 26pt.

Locking all lines to the baseline grid.

Once you have the baseline grid set up, you can easily use it for many other things. E.g. small subheadings you want to control the space above and below. In the next image you will see a subheading taking up three lines of space, and adjusting the space by 2/3 above and 1/3 below. This is done by locking the lines to the baseline grid and lifting it from the baseline by 8.667pt using Baseline Shift in the Advanced Character Formats section.

I will refer to my screencast on "subheadings the right way" for more information on why I choose to do my subheadings this way.

To lift locked text a specific amount of space from the baseline, you can use Baseline Shift.

Grid based design

Amongst other things you can use the baseline grid for are placement of images, page numbers, running headers etc. Consistently using the same spacing makes the page design more logic - which is why you probably also want to look more into grid based designing.

I just want to add a final comment to using grids for designing. Grids are a great tool and can really help organizing things in a design. Aligning everything perfectly is a great start, but in the end it is the human eye that matters.

If you place images in the baseline grid, you really want the top of the image to optically align with the top of the text, which means you really want the top of the image to begin somewhere else than in the grid, probably in the x-height of the text.

Fine tuning a grid based design is all about optical alignment - the human eye is what matters in the end!

It also means in bigger headings, uncials etc, you probably want to let serifs in A's, V's etc break the left text frame edge a little, to optically align the left edge of the text.

InDesign gives you tools to achieve some of this, but I will save that for upcoming posts in the better typography series.

Check out The Grid System for a lot of templates, articles, tools and inspiration on grid based design.

This is the first of a new series of posts here on InDesigning.net giving you handy tools to achieve better typography in InDesign. The posts will be small guides ranging from beginner to intermediate level, teaching how to achieve specific things.

This first post is about getting your quotation marks right.

Typographer's quotes

Per default, typographer's quotes will be turned on for new documents in InDesign. As with all the settings in InDesign you can set your default preferences by launching the Preferences when all documents are closed.

When typographer's quotes are turned on, InDesign will use real quotation marks instead of primes. Luckily for english speaking people the default setting for quotes are “like this”. Bad luck for the rest of us, because that is wrong in most other languages, and it is really rare that people get it right.

Besides defining whether to use typographer's quotes in Preferences » Type, you can change which kind of quotes you wish to use in Preferences » Dictionary. When you change the quotes, remember to have the right language selected, because which quotes are typed depends on the language specified for the text you are writing. In Danish the correct quotation marks are „like this“ - for a nice list of usages in different languages, look at Wikipedia.

Danish quotation mark settings.

Writing the quotes

When the typographer's quotes feature is turned on, InDesign will automatically write the right quotation mark when you type the character as you are used to. Remember that what marks are used depends on the language the text is set to.

An example of the real quotation marks in use.

If you realize to late, that you were writing with the wrong quotes or language settings, it is never to late to change it. Select the right language and find/change is your solution: search for a primer ("), and change them to a primer ("). InDesign will find all quotation marks and change them to the right typographer's quotes, again depending on the language of text it is a part of and the Dictionary settings.

Find/change quotation marks.