From the course: InDesign Secrets
286 How to format ellipses - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
286 How to format ellipses
- [Instructor] An ellipses, like this character here, is a symbol that indicates that something is omitted, or missing, or sometimes it's used to indicate a long pause in dialog. I think my love of the ellipses character comes from reading Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett plays, where the symbol is almost like a word all by itself. But the problem is that typing an ellipses is easy, but making it look right is not. There are several ways to make a really good ellipses. You might know that you can type an ellipses character by holding down the Option key on the Mac, or Alt on Windows, and then hitting the Semicolon key. But look at that ellipses character, it's all bunched up together, like a rodent hiding in a corner. So yes, technically that works, but I much prefer to build a real ellipses, something that looks attractive on the page. So the trick to an ellipses is that you need to use a combination of dots or periods, and the right kind of white spaces. Let me show you how. I'll double click on this type frame to switch to the text tool, and then I'll delete that ellipses, and also the space after it. Now I'm going to head up to the Type menu and come all the way down to the Insert White Space submenu. In here, I'm going to choose Nonbreaking Space Fixed Width. I want it to be fixed width, because I don't want the spaces around the ellipses to change and justify text. That is, I don't want some to be wider and some to be narrower. And I want it to be nonbreaking because I don't want my ellipses to start at the beginning of the line, or to break apart across the line. I aways want the whole thing stuck to the previous word. Now, if in your document design you don't mind the ellipses beginning at the beginning of the sentence, then you might want to choose a different space instead. Like a quarter space, or maybe a sixth space. But in this case, I'm going to be using a nonbreaking space fixed width. Next, I'm going to type a dot, or the period character. Now I want to repeat that. The space and the period. So I'm just going to select those two characters, I just did a Shift Left Arrow a couple of times to select them, and I'll copy them to the clipboard, press the right arrow, and I'll paste a few times. Now I've got one too many dots, so I'll just press the Delete key to delete that one. I'm going to head back up to the Type menu and I'm going to choose way down here at the bottom Show Hidden Characters, that way I can actually see those hidden or invisible space characters. See how these space characters that I inserted look like a blue dot with a carat over them? Well, if this text frame were on a different layer, it would be red or green or something else, but I'm on the blue layer, so these characters look blue, matching the frame edge. Anyway, that symbol, the dot with a carat over it, indicates a nonbreaking fixed width space. Now currently, I have one of those at the end of the ellipses as well, but I don't mind if the ellipses is sitting by itself at the end of a line, so I'm going to add one more character here. I'll go back to the Type menu, choose Insert Break Character, and then down at the very bottom, I'll choose Discretionary Line Break. So, there we have it. It's a nice looking ellipses with some air in it, and it'll stick with the word before it, but break at the end of the line if it needs to. Now, there are other ways to construct these of course, like you could use regular spaces, or some other kind of fixed width space, like I mentioned the quarter space. And if you want to make it a little tighter, you might even want to use thin spaces. You can play around with it using different space characters to get the look you like. But this is, all in all, a better looking ellipses. Of course, the only problem is that it's not easy to type. You don't want to have to do that every time you want to type an ellipses, right? So here's what I do. I use the regular ellipses character while I'm editing and doing the initial layout, but then, when I'm really ready to style my document, I open the Find/Change dialog box, by pressing Command F or Control F on Windows, and then inside the Find what field, I'll type my normal ellipses character, Option or Alt Semi-Colon followed by a space. And then I want to change this to a code. It looks kind of strange, but here's what you type. Carat S and then a dot. And then I repeat that. Carat S dot, carat S dot, carat S and then carat K. That carat K is the symbol for the discretionary line break. Now I know this looks weird, but it's pretty easy to remember once you do it a few times, or you can jot it on a piece of paper or something. And this just means type a nonbreaking fixed width space character, followed by a dot and so on, until that last code, which means, again, discretionary line break. So now when I click Change, it goes throughout my entire document and it replaces all of those dumb looking ellipses with pretty ones. Here I'll click Done, and you can see that it's made the change. Now let me go up to the Type menu, and I'll choose Hide Hidden Characters, and now you can see that all of those ellipses look much better. Now the reason I like InDesign so much, is that it lets me make my type look exactly the way I want, right? And creating your own custom ellipse is one way to bring your document design up to a higher level.
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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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(Locked)
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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(Locked)
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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