From the course: InDesign Secrets
267 When all your numbers are superscript - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
267 When all your numbers are superscript
- [Instructor] I got a call from a client the other day. Well actually, an e-mail, not a call, who said, "Help!" That was the subject. And she is an experienced InDesign user. But her question was, she just changed the font on some text and suddenly all of her numbers became superscripted. She could not figure out why. She would select the numbers, but they didn't show that they were superscripted. Now, some people, when I post this, they immediately know why, what happened, how to fix it. But other people are like, yes! That happened to me and I could never figure it out. I just decided I can't use that font. Let me show you what the problem is and how to fix it. Here we have a chapter from a book about cheese. Let's zoom in bit so it's a little easier to see. And everything looks fine. We have some nicely formatted fractions. Even the complicated ones here like 12/15. Everything else is fine. The years and the numbers, they are all at their correct formatting. Now if I select all this text and I change it from this font called Lato to something common, let's try Minion Pro. Turn off, there we go, Minion Pro medium. Holy moly, what happened here? This is an open-type font, and it's a very common font, it's the default font for basic paragraph style. But look at what it did to all of its numbers. Sometimes, depending on the font that you choose, even other characters will jump up. Like, let me hide non-printing characters, and you'll see that the commas are also superscripted and so are the parentheses and periods. It's not just the numbers, so what happened here? This is what happened to my client. And the answer is that while they were using a more intelligent font, like the Lato one, let's come back up here and change it back to Lato medium. Somebody had the bright idea of either editing the paragraph style or selecting all the text as an override. Let's take a look at the paragraph style, and we'll edit this one. Down here in open type features, they've turned on fractions. The fractions, in an open type font, are special glyphs that are numerators, or, if they come after slash, denominators. And they're specially designed at that size. So it's not like a mathematically superscripted or downsized font. It's a different typeface that open type fractions are smart enough to substitute for the numbers. But in some typefaces, like Minion, when you apply the open type formatting to the entire selection of text, it does not know that it's only supposed to be applying it to fractions. And so it applies it to everything that could be the numerator of a fraction, like a parentheses or a comma, or a period. Maybe you were typing 100.32 over 15. That's the problem. So the best practice here is do not apply fraction formatting for the entire paragraph, oh and definitely don't include it in a style. So I'm going to come back over here to open type features and turn off fractions. Now the question is, well how do you make the fractions look good? Well, what you're supposed to do is select them, and then go to the control panel menu, go to open type and turn on fractions manually, one by one. Now in CC 2015, you can see that it automatically suggests why don't you use the fraction version of this, which makes life a little easier. Whenever you see that blue line underneath the selection that means that there is an alternative glyph for the selection, and you can just select it. Or, even better would be, let's find another one, let's just say here 2/3, okay, would be to edit to edit the style with a GREP style. Now let's say that you have already created a character style that applies the open type fraction formatting as I've done here, and then you want to apply it to any digit followed by a slash followed by another digit. And I have commented it out so that it's not working right now with this asterisk in front of the GREP code, which is probably another InDesign secrets tip that I should record, but I'll just delete that asterisk. And then click in the gray area and you can see how it's working automatically. So whenever it finds the pattern of one or more numbers, followed by slash, followed by one or more numbers, it will apply the open type fraction formatting to that fraction. And that's the answer. My poor client was relieved to know that she didn't have a virus or a corrupt font, all she needed to do was do a little fine tuning to how she was formatting her fractions.
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Contents
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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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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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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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