There are lots of different preferences when it comes to text and how it is used. You may be familiar with how some of the tools are used because simple word processors may use them. Sometimes you want to justify the text to make the columns appear nicer and remove the raggedy edge (this is called the rag), and other times you want to edit the spaces in between the words, lines and even the letters. This is where InDesign stands out in comparison to other word processors.

Here are a couple tips on how to wrangle all that stray text for your next project.

Let’s start with some basic terminology to help identify some specifics:

Kerning and Tracking: The space in between each letter. While tracking increases the space between characters evenly, regardless of the characters, kerning increases the space based on character pairs. There is strong kerning between the V and the A, and no kerning between the S and the T.

Leading: The space in between each line.

Glyph Scaling: The width of characters (a glyph is any font character). Glyph Scaling values can range from 50% to 200%.

River: Gaps in between words which forms a channel that looks as if it is “flowing” vertically through a column of text.

Title Kerning Trick

I have run into a bit of a problem more than a few times where I have made a large title for a document and it is so big that everyone can see that the gaps in between each letter is uneven. These gaps may be bad for some people so I will show you a very quick tip on how to fix this with good results in a fraction of a second.

Title with uneven kerning

You can see the title I chose is very big and you can definitely see the gaps. Let’s fix this.

Highlight your title to change -> Open the Character palette (CMD + T) -> under the Kerning menu, change the selection from “Metrics” to “Optical”. This should reap immediate results.

Title with improved kerning

Justification Tips and Tricks

InDesign is the best text layout engine bar-none nothing even comes close. Here I am going to touch on how it handles justification of text in a regular two column layout. Pay attention as here are a few tips that can help put those tiny polishing touches on that great project you’ve been working on for the past month.

Here I have a chunk of justified text which doesn’t look all that great. I have turned hyphenation off (I always do this as I never appreciate hyphens) from the Paragraph palette. There are unsightly gaps in between words some that are big and others which are small. Some people don’t care, but I do. This bothers me. Let’s take some of that space between the words and spread it out in between the letters of the words. Check it out.

Rivers and Gaps

Big and Small gaps

Highlight your text -> Paragraph Palette flyout menu-> Justification

Justification Settings

I’ve pointed out those unsightly gaps…now lets take 5% out of the letter spacing and place it inside some of those gaps. This may help us save a line or two as well as reduce some of those unsightly gaps. Change the minimum letter spacing value to -5% and the maximum 5% to fill up some of those gaps we are targeting.

Adjust letter spacing

Gaps are reduced and everything looks much better

Looking much better now.

Now we can focus on one more thing that bothers me. Hanging punctuation. I don’t know about you, but I love having my text line up all together. This can be interrupted visually if a punctuation mark sits there. See below for what I mean.

Hanging Punctuation

See how the text is not lined up with the inside edge of the column (blue line)? That’s right. The period is the one that is lined up. Here’s how to correct this:

Go to Type Menu -> Story and click on “Optical Margin Alignment”. This is the magic checkbox that fixes everything. I have checked it and you can see that the period is bumped out ever so slightly. Take a peek to see what I mean.

Optical Margin Alignment makes everything good

Well that’s it! I hope you have enjoyed my posting on how to control text a bit better. Maybe you’ve picked up a couple new things that will contribute to future projects down the road.