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.