From the course: InDesign Secrets
202 Formatting drop words in a text document - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
202 Formatting drop words in a text document
- You probably already know how to make a drop cap of one or more characters. And you probably know that you can define a paragraph style that not just formats a paragraph with a drop cap but also applies a character style to that drop cap. But here in this document, I have something different. This is not a drop cap, it's a drop word. The whole word is dropped and here's the crazy part. If I choose the Type tool in the Tool panel and then click inside this word, I can start typing and you can see that it actually updates automatically. That's why I call it a drop word. Now this is not a feature in InDesign. In InDesign you can assign a certain number of characters to drop but not an entire word. So what's the trick? How did I do it? Well in this case, I did not use InDesign's built-in drop cap feature at all. Instead, I kind of faked it by using a combination of a character style, a nested style and text wrap. Let me show you how. First, I'll press the esc key to jump to the Selection tool and then I'll press the w key to jump out of preview mode. That let's me see the guides, the frame edges and this little object sitting right there. That is actually a little frame and that frame is an anchored in-line object and that object has text wrap. Ok, now that you've seen that, let me jump to this other document over here. This is a clean document. Doesn't have any paragraph styles or character styles or anything. I'm just going to start from scratch. First, let's open the Character Styles panel and I'll create a new character style. And I'm going to make this my drop word character style. You can call it anything you want but I'm going to call it dropword. Inside here, I'm going to change the font. I'll say, how about Myriad Pro then make it Bold. Because it needs to drop two lines, I'm also going to make it larger. I'll say 30 points. Now I'll click Ok and you'll see that the character style shows up in my Character Styles panel. I won't apply it manually, instead, I'm going to apply it with a paragraph style. So I'll open the Paragraph Styles panel and here inside the Paragraph Styles panel menu I'll choose New Paragraph Style. I'm going to call this paragraph style drop words. And again, you can call it anything you want. Now I'm going to click on the Drop Caps and Nested Style pane in this list over on the left. I'm not going to use the Drop Caps feature, instead, I'm going to use the Nested Styles feature. To do that, I'll click the New Nested Style button and then I'm going to say, I want a character style, in this case the one I just created, the dropword character style, to be applied through the first word. That's what that means. Dropword character style applied through the first word. Ok, let's see it in action. I'll click Ok and then place my text cursor inside this paragraph over here simply by double clicking on it. That switched to the text tool and places the cursor inside that paragraph. Now I'll head back to the Paragraph Styles panel and click on drop words. There you go, there is my drop word. But it's going up instead of down. I need it to go down instead. To make it drop down from it's current baseline, I need to use the baseline shift feature. So I'll head back to the Character Styles panel, I'll right-click or ctrl + click with a one-button mouse on the dropword character style and choose Edit. I want to make sure the Preview check box is turned on down here in the lower left corner so I can see on my document page as I change what's inside this dialog box. I'll select the Advanced Character Formats pane and then I'll change the baseline shift to say, -15 points. When I hit tab to jump to the next field, InDesign updates and shows me the change on the page. That first word is now in the proper size and in the proper location. So I'll click Ok. Now there are still two problems here of course. One is that that drop word is sitting on top of some other text. And second is that big line, that big space above the paragraph. That space is there because this paragraph is set to automatic leading. You probably know that you should not use auto leading most of the time, you should use absolute leading. So let's go ahead and change that. I'll open my paragraph styles panel, I'll double click on my drop words paragraph style and I can see here in the Basic Character Formats pane that this is set to auto leading. I know it's auto leading because the number is inside parentheses. I don't want that. I'm going to change this to absolute leading of exactly 15 points. And now as soon as I press enter or return or click the Ok button, you'll see it updates. All right, now let's take care of that text wrap problem. You remember that earlier I showed you how I did the text wrap but it's a little bit tricky so let me step you through it. First, make a very thin frame. For example, I'll take a frame like that and throw it on my pasteboard. Then I'll choose the Selection tool and I'm going to make the width of this frame something very small, like .5 points. Then I'll hit the tab key to jump to the height field and I'll make this small as well, like 1 pica. So I have a very small, very thin frame sitting on my pasteboard and I want to anchor that in the text. But before I do that I must, this is really important, I must apply an object style to it. To do that, I'll open the Object Styles panel that's over here in the dock. If you don't see these styles panels over here in the dock on the right side of the screen then you may need to change your workspace to Advanced. Anyway, inside the Objects Styles panel I'm going to make a new object style by choosing New Object Style from the panel menu. I'll call this drop words again. Again, you can call it anything you want but I'm going to call it drop words. And I'm going to cause it to have a text wrap by clicking on the Text Wrap & Other pane over here and then turning on the Text Wrap feature right there. That second button. Now I want this text wrap to only push text to the right side, not the left and right side. Text should only flow around the right side so I'll choose Right Side from the Wrap To pop-up menu. Then I'm going to click on the next pane down. It's labeled Anchored Object Options. And I'm going to set the Y Offset for the Inline object to say, minus one p, -1 pica. That's all I need to do. And finally, I'm going to go back to the General pane and I'm going to turn on the Apply Style to Selection check box. That way, when I click Ok, it'll automatically apply this object style to that object on the pasteboard. Now it doesn't look like anything changed but believe me, it did apply the object style to that object. Now, because that object is still selected on the pasteboard, all I need to do is cut it to the clipboard with a cmd + x or a ctrl + x on Windows. And then paste it in exactly where I want it. I'm going to double click just before the second word, which again, switches to the Type tool and places the cursor there. And now, all I need to do is paste, cmd + v or ctrl + v on Windows. And you see, I have the effect I was looking for. A drop word. And in fact, if I come in here and start typing, it updates automatically. Now, you wouldn't want to apply that manually every time you needed one of these. Instead, you'd want to automate it. And now that we have all our styles, it's easy to do that. For example, I'm going to select all the text in this story by pressing cmd + a or ctrl + a on Windows and then I'll go to the Paragraph Styles panel and choose drop words. Now when I click over here to deselect all that text, you'll see that it's applied that drop word throughout the entire story. Every paragraph has one. What's missing is that text wrap object. It wouldn't be so hard for me to copy and paste that one little object from one paragraph to the next but I'm going to show you a super secret grep trick that's going to make it really fast. To do that I'll open the Find/Change dialog box by pressing cmd + f or ctrl + f on Windows. Then I'll click on the Grep tab. Now, grep can be really scary but I'm going to show you exactly what to type so it'll go very smoothly. You don't have to worry about this at all. Inside the "Find what" field, I'm going to type (.+?\s) Now again, I know that's kind of freaky but what that means is "find the first word". The first word of a paragraph. That's what that code means. Down here inside the "Change to" field, I'm going to type $1 and then I need to type a special code that means, "Whatever's on the clipboard, put it in here." To do that, I'll click on this little @ symbol and I'm going to scroll down to the Other sub-menu and then choose Clipboard Contents, Formatted. So once again, this grep code means "Find the first word followed by a space." And the "Change to" means, "Whatever word you found, "put in there followed by whatever "is currently on the clipboard." And you know what's currently on the clipboard right? That little object with text wrap on it. Let's try it out. I'll click Change All and it goes through the entire document, says 8 replacements made, I'll click Ok. Click Done and we can see that it has updated all of these. Let's pan over here so we can see. There we go, every one of these is updated to be a drop word. The right style, the right look and it has a text wrap. And the best news is we can update it anytime we want. I'll go back to the Character Styles panel, I'll right click on the dropword character style and choose Edit 'dropword' and I'm going to change this. Let's change the size to say, 17 points instead. Make it smaller. And then I'll change the Advanced Character Formats so that the Baseline Shift is much higher. Like in fact, 0. And why don't we change the color as well. Let's make it red. I'll click Ok and we can see how it looks. Now that might look strange to you but as it turns out, this kind of drop word, where the word is highlighted and with a big space underneath it, is actually a really important typographic technique in Hebrew. Of course, in Hebrew the text flows from right to left. But the technique works just as well. So now you know both how to make a drop cap and a drop word.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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