From the course: InDesign Secrets

326 Changing word or character spacing in a paragraph style - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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326 Changing word or character spacing in a paragraph style

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- [Instructor] This text spacing is too loose. I mean, it's fine, but I just think it would look better if the spacing between each word and maybe even between each letter were a little tighter. Most InDesign users would change this by selecting all the text in a paragraph like this and then changing the kerning or tracking value up at the control panel. For example, I'll change tracking to say -10, that tightens it up. And while there's nothing technically wrong with doing that, I want to show you a better way. Now, in general changing tracking or kerning is fine when you're just changing a word or a sentence or something like that. But if you're trying to change the overall spacing of your text, which is sometimes called the text color, then you should probably use the justification dialog box instead. Here, let me undo this with a command Z or a control Z on Windows. And now, I'm just going to place my cursor anywhere inside this paragraph. I don't have to select the entire paragraph, because I'm changing paragraph formatting. Then, I'll go to the control panel fly out menu that's way over here on the right side of the control panel, and I'll choose Justification. Now, this might seem weird because this text isn't even justified. Here, let me move this out of the way. You can see that this text is all ragged right, or sometimes called left aligned. But that's fine, the justification dialog box works on any text. And you can see in the top of this dialog box there are three main categories. Word spacing, letter spacing and glyph scaling. In this case, I want to focus on the first two. You see how the word spacing desired value is 100%? That means 100% of what the font designer said that the spacing should be. But if I want to tighten all of this text up a little bit, I'll lower this desired setting for word spacing to say 85%. Now, when I turn on the preview check box you can see that it tightened up that paragraph, but only that one paragraph. If I want to change all the text in my document, I don't want to change it one paragraph at a time, I want to change the paragraph style. So I'll click cancel here and instead I'm going to double click on the paragraph style here in the paragraph style panel. That lets me edit that style and here I have the justification pane. I'll select that and once again I'll change my desired word spacing to 85%. Because the preview check box is turned on in the dialog box you can see it immediately affects all the text in my document. So that changed the word spacing, the spaces between the words. But now lets change the letter spacing. If I want to make the desired value smaller here, I have to first change the minimum because desired can't be lower than the minimum. So I'll lower the minimum to -3%. And now I can change the desired to -3% too. When you're working with normal paragraph text you generally only want to change this in small values like -2 or -3%. For big headline text you can tighten it up a lot more. Now let's go ahead and turn the preview check box off to see before and after. Let's move the dialog box out of the way so we can really see this. Before and after. You can really see what a big difference this makes. It tightens up the body text throughout the document. This is the best way to adjust your text spacing or your text color because of course you can always go back and change your paragraph style at any time if you want to update it.

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