From the course: InDesign: Typography Part 1

Casing - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Typography Part 1

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Casing

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- [Voiceover] Here I want to talk about casing, lower case letters and upper case letters, so called because in the pre-digital age small letters were stored in the lower case and big letters were stored in the upper case. It's conventional wisdom that type set in upper and lower is more readable for continuous reading than type set in all caps. And the reason for that is that we read by recognizing word shapes and the shapes of words set in upper and lower are more interesting, more distinct, more recognizable than those set all in uppercase where the profile of every word is essentially a rectangle. I'm not saying never use text in all caps, all caps can be very effective when used sparingly, and especially when used for headlines, but for continuous reading text as we can see here the text on the left I think is much more readable, much more approachable, much more friendly than the text on the right. Not to mention, it takes up a lot less space. If you do need to change the case of your type that is easily done in one direction. If you've typed it in upper and lower and you want to go to upper case just click into the text frame, in this case I'll press Command A to select all, and then I can click on the two Ts to go to upper case. Alternatively, I can use the keyboard shortcut, Cmd Shift or Ctrl Shift K to toggle between those two. Now if on the other hand the text has been typed with the caps lock key on that option isn't available to me. There is another option, but it's not as good. And if I come to the type menu and to change case you can see that we have these different casing options. Unfortunately, these options have long been forgotten in InDesign's development and evolution and they're very unsophisticated, because if I choose sentence case, which is the one I'm after here you see that that is so easily tripped up, because it will take every period or full stop as indicating the end of a sentence, which of course will not always be true.

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