From the course: InDesign Secrets

267 When all your numbers are superscript - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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267 When all your numbers are superscript

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- [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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