InDesigning.net

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.

Recently I was introduced to the hidden "World-Ready composer" in InDesign CS4. It is really nice to see a little of how Adobe is preparing for the future in typesetting complicated, right to left languages etc.

After becoming aware of this new composer, some of the documentation I had previously stumbled across in InDesigns AppleScript library became more obvious, "kashidas", "diacritic position" etc.

An example of Arabic in InDesign CS4.

A little searching around the internet, I ended up at Thomas Phinney's fantastic blog, World-Ready Composer in Adobe CS4, where he explains the specifics about what the new composer is for, and why it wasn't officially documented and included in CS4, and gives you a lot of different tools to enable and use these features in InDesign.

The settings

After reading through all the documentation I could find, i have made a short list here, of things that can be applied to text in InDesign CS4 through e.g. AppleScript.

character direction

The direction of the character. Can be default direction, left to right direction or right to left direction.

composer

The text composer to use to compose the text. Can be "Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer", "Adobe World-Ready Single-line Composer", "Adobe Paragraph Composer" or "Adobe Single-line Composer".

diacritic position

Position of diacriticical characters. Can be default position, loose position, medium position, tight position or opentype position.

digits type

The digits type. Can be default digits, arabic digits, hindi digits, farsi digits, Native digits, full farsi digits, thai digits, lao digits, devanagari digits, bengali digits, gurmukhi digits, gujarati digits, oriya digits, tamil digits, telugu digits, kannada digits, malayalam digits, tibetan digits, khmer digits or burmese digits.

kashidas

Use of Kashidas for justification. Can be default kashidas or kashidas off.

keyboard direction

The keyboard direction of the character. Can be default direction, left to right direction or right to left direction.

paragraph direction

Paragraph direction. Can be left to right direction or right to left direction.

paragraph justification

Paragraph justification. Can be default justification, arabic justification or naskh justification.

x offset diacritic

The x (horizontal) offset for diacritic adjustment.

y offset diacritic

The y (vertical) offset for diacritic adjustment.

Small activation script

If you would like to play around with this, I have written a small piece of AppleScriptJavaScript that creates a paragraph style with these settings:

• character direction: right to left direction
• composer: "Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer"
• digits type: arabic digits
• paragraph direction: right to left direction
• paragraph justification: arabic justification
• kashidas: default kashidas
• diacritic position: opentype position

The AppleScriptJavaScript can be downloaded here: create_arabic_pstyle.jsx. Modify the script to your needs, the AppleScriptJavaScript syntax should be quite easy to understand.

You can add it to your Scripts palette and run it from there. To do that, place the file inside the "~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 6.0/Scripts/Scripts Panel" folder.

If you run an InCopy workflow, or you have found this post by searching the web, you probably know the issue with markup up index words in InCopy - the tool is missing.

In the projects where we run an InCopy workflow, it is mainly books, where the editors easily can proofread and correct in the story itself, and letting them mark up index words would be a great in that process as well. I can't see any obvious reason to why Adobe left it out, other than InCopy might be more minded on magazine editing(?), and there isn't much use for indexing in magazines.

The solution

In books where the index are marked up late in the process, after the book is typeset and proofread, we either mark it up ourselves from a printed copy with highlighted words, or we let the editors mark up the index words in InCopy using a colour swatch. When we receive the InCopy story from them, an AppleScriptJavaScript in InDesign takes care of finding all the coloured words and marking them up as index words. When the script is done, a quick search/replace takes care of colouring the words back to their original colour.

The dialog box that asks you which swatch you want to make an index from.

The script might come in handy in other cases as well, but the InCopy case is the most obvious. The same script could be done with character styles as well, but since I'd like to enable marking up that already have a character style applied, I found swatches better suited.

The script

I have uploaded the basic script - letting you select a swatch from a list and it searches the current document, marking up words. You are free to modify it to your needs - might come in handy to convert words to lowercase or things like that.

You can add it to your Scripts palette and run it from there. To do that, place the file inside the "~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version X.0/Scripts/Scripts Panel" folder.

Download index_from_colour.jsx.

There are many reasons to start replacing your old font archive with OpenType alternatives. I mentioned one of the reasons earlier in the GREP style small caps post, and I will mention another reason today: Stylistic sets.

Normally, the different stylistic sets available for a font is mentioned in the font specimen. In this example I will use the font Hypatia Sans Pro, that shipped with the CS3 packages, and here is a link to the stylistic set descriptions.

Stylistic sets is used in OpenType to give you options of what you want the font to look like, offer you alternative letters etc. In Hypatia you have nothing less than 14 different stylistic sets to choose from, enabling you to decide whether you want serifs or not, alternative e's, J's, y's etc.

Another way to find out which stylistic sets you want to apply, instead of looking in the specimen, you can use InDesign's glyph palette. If you see field with a small arrow in the bottom right corner, it shows there are alternatives available for this letter. In this case I click and hold the "b"-glyph and I notice two alternatives – a small caps variant and a sans serif variant. Hovering the glyph a little you will notice a line containing "ss01 (ss01)". That line tells you how to achieve this look, by applying "stylistic set 01". In other cases the line could have looked like "Small Capitals (smcp) + ss10 (ss10)", which means you have to apply both small capitals and stylistic set 10.

Using InDesign's glyph palette to find stylistic sets.

You can also choose to see each individual stylistic set from the glyph palettes drop down menu, where you can see the entire contents of the set.

Using InDesign's glyph palette to see contents of a stylistic set.

How to apply the stylistic set

You find most of the OpenType related things in the OpenType Features section of of your paragraph style, other things like OpenType Superior/Superscript and OpenType All Small Caps are located in the Basic Character Formats section under Case and Position.

You can apply the stylistic sets in the OpenType Features section.

Specifically to apply a stylistic set, you want to look in the OpenType Features section where you can choose from a list of 20 possible stylistic sets. InDesign always shows 20 sets, even though the font used may feature none at all. As you notice, the selected drop down items are checked, which enables you to apply multiple stylistic sets.