From the course: InDesign Secrets
334 Free script to rotate selected characters - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
334 Free script to rotate selected characters
- [Instructor] Have you ever wanted to rotate a single character, a single piece of text, like for example, I have this arrow over here on the right. I wish it were pointing to the left. Or maybe I want it pointing downward at an angle. Here's the crazy thing. InDesign actually has a rotate character feature built in, but the UI, the user interface that lets you use the feature only exists in the Asian, the CJK version of the program. But, I'm using the English version, so how do I get that feature? You could select that character and convert it to outlines, and then it would become an anchored inline object, and InDesign does let you rotate those, like any other frame. Here's another option. There's a free script that my friend Kieth Gilbert wrote. You can find the script here on InDesignSecrets.com. Just search the site for rotated characters, and you'll find it. Then, you can download and install it. It'll show up inside your InDesign scripts panel. If you need any help installing scripts, we talked about that in an earlier InDesign Secrets video. It's really easy. I've already downloaded and installed it. You can see it, by going the Window menu and then choosing Utilities, and then Scripts. I've put it inside my User Scripts folder, so you see it there. To use this script, I just need to select the character that I want to rotate. I can do that by double clicking with the selection tool. Now it switches to the type tool automatically of course. Then I'll select that character. Now I double click on the script. The first thing you'll see is this dialogue box with a little bit of information about my friend Keith. Go ahead and read that, and then click OK. Now it's going to ask you what angle you want to rotate that character. In this case, I'm going to turn it around. I'm going to rotate it 180 degrees. Then I'll click Yes. There you go, now the character is flipped around so that it's pointing to the left. Rotating a character 180 degrees usually works really easily but sometimes if you rotate by a different angle you'll get a kind of weird effect. For example, I'm gong to select this letter P. I'll rotate that. Let's go ahead and double click on that script. This time I'm going to turn on this check box that says, "Hide this box for 30 days." Then I'll click OK. I'm going to rotate this, let's say 15 degrees. As soon as I do that, you'll see that two things happened. First, the character was rotated, but second, I got a lot of extra space on the left and right of the character. Unfortunately that's just the way it works. But you can fix this by applying some kerning. For example I'll click between the P and the R. Then, I'll come over here and change the kerning to minus 100. I can make this even tighter, by holding down the Option or Alt key, and then I'll press the left arrow key on my keyboard a few times to make it even tighter. That changes the kerning between those two characters. Now I'll come over here, click between the E and the P. I'll do the same thing with my Option, left arrow trick. There we go. Obviously you're not going to want to do this very often, but when you do need it, this free script is really awesome.
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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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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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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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