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.