From the course: InDesign Secrets
360 Find spacing problems - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
360 Find spacing problems
- [Instructor] Usually, when you're working in InDesign, your eye is on the text, that is, what the characters and the words look like, and how the paragraphs flow on the page. But my friend and colleague, Nigel French, reminded me recently that sometimes you need to pay attention to the spaces between the words, especially when you're working on a text-heavy document, because you need the spaces to be as evenly distributed as possible. The problem, of course, is that it's hard to see what isn't there. For example, when you look at this page, which stands out more, the words or the spaces between the words? The words, right? So, here's a quick method that Nigel devised to show the spaces and hide the text. The trick is to add two GREP styles to your paragraph style. It's really easy. First, I'm going to make two new character styles in this document. So I'll open my Character Styles panel, and I'm going to Option or Alt click on the Create New Style button. By holding down Option or Alt, it forces the dialog box to open. The first one, I'm going to call Hide Me, and it's going to make the text nearly invisible, and the way I do that is to switch to the Character Color pane, and then set the color, the fill color of this, to 5% black. Now, I could actually set the color to paper, or I'll scroll up here. I could choose None, which would make the text entirely disappear, but I kind of like seeing the text a little bit, so I'm going to use 5% black. Now, I'll click Okay, and I'll create another character style. This one I'm going to call Bar. Now obviously you can call it anything you want, and this one is going to have a giant strike-through, so I'll choose Strike-Through Options, and I'm gonna turn this on, and I'm going to make a really thick strike-through, like 10 points thick, and let's make this solid. I'll set my offset to say, four points, and then I'm going to change the color to black. This looks good, so I'll click Okay. Now, I need to apply those to the text. So up here in the Paragraph Styles panel, I'm going to right click on the paragraph style that's applied to all of that text. That's Body in this case. Now, I can choose Edit Body, and over here, in the GREP Style pane, I'm going to add two new GREP styles, one after the other. The first one is going to assign a character style called Hide Me. That's the one I just made, and the second one is going to assign the Bar style. Now, what am I going to apply these styles to? Well, I'm going to apply the Hide Me style to anything that is not a space, and I can type that by clicking on the code here, and typing open square bracket, then the caret symbol, back-slash, the letter S and then the close square bracket. That code literally means anything that is not a space. Now the Bar style down here is going to be applied to anything that is a space, so I simply type back-slash, S. There we go, now when I click Okay, you'll see it take effect. Everything that's text changed to very faint text and all the space becomes a black bar. It's really obvious. Now what's great about this is that you can quickly see the worst offenders in rivers, like when space seems to trickle down from line to line, and also, when there's just too much space between words in the middle of a paragraph. So for example, I can see the first line on the left page has really large spaces, and then the other lines have much smaller spaces. That unevenness in space is actually going to be a little bit distracting to the reader. So this tells me that I probably want to tweak the hyphenation or the justification of this paragraph style, or maybe make some other kind of edit, so I get more even spacing. We've covered hyphenation and justification in other movies in this title. Now, a couple more things I want to point out. First, because I just added those GREP styles, I can press Command Z on the Mac or Control Z on Windows, to see before, and then Command Shift or Control Shift Z to get after, and that before and after effect is also really helpful, so in that case, if I want to get rid of those black bars, all I need to do is go back to my paragraph style, edit it, and remove those GREP styles. I'll simply select them, click Delete. Select this one and then click Delete. Now when I click Okay, it goes back to the way it was originally. I love this typography tip, and if you want more tips like this, you should also check out the many titles that Nigel French has recorded here in the online training library.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
-
230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
-
(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
-
232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
-
(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
-
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
(Locked)
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
(Locked)
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
(Locked)
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
(Locked)
111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
-
(Locked)
112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
-
(Locked)
113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
-
(Locked)
114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
-
(Locked)
115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
-
(Locked)
108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
-
(Locked)
109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
-
(Locked)
110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
(Locked)
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
(Locked)
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
(Locked)
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
(Locked)
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
(Locked)
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
(Locked)
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
(Locked)
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
(Locked)
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
(Locked)
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
(Locked)
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
-
(Locked)
048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
-
(Locked)
049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
-
(Locked)
050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
(Locked)
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
(Locked)
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
(Locked)
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
(Locked)
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
(Locked)
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
-
(Locked)
028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
-
(Locked)
029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
-
(Locked)
030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
-
(Locked)
031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
-
(Locked)
032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
-
(Locked)
008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
-
(Locked)
009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
-
(Locked)
010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
-
(Locked)