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.

Contents