Quick, what's the keyboard shortcut to type the Registered Trademark Symbol or how about an Em Dash? If you don't use these characters very often, there's no reason to clutter your head with trying to remember the shortcuts. InDesign has a couple of features that makes inserting special characters a breeze. I'm going to select this text frame on my page, and zoom in to 400% by pressing Command+4 on a Mac, or Ctrl+4 on Windows. I'm going to switch the Type tool and place my cursor right after the word Gallery here by double-clicking, and now I'd like to insert a special character here.
So I'm going to go to the Type menu and look all the way down at the very end where it says Insert Special Character. Inside the Symbol submenu, we'll find many of the characters that people often need. Such as Bullets, Copyrights, Ellipsis, Paragraphs, that's the little pilcrow symbol and then, finally here's the one we were looking for, Registered Trademark. I'll select that and InDesign types it for me. There is lot's of other special characters hiding in there too. Let's say, I don't remember how to type an En Dash.
This little En Dash that I want to use instead of a hyphen when I'm talking about ranges. I'll just delete that, go back to the Type menu and choose Insert Special Character and instead of Symbols, I'm going to choose Hyphens and Dashes, and there it is. There's my En Dash. Now perhaps I don't like the amount of space there is between the 6 and that En Dash. I can place my cursor between them, and add a little bit of space with a special white space character. Down near at the bottom of the Type menu you'll see that there's not only an Insert Special Character menu, but also an Insert White Space menu, and inside this submenu, you'll find all kinds of special spaces.
From the very large Em Space, it's very wide Em Space there, to the sort of medium-sized En Space. But we really want a tiny little space. So I'm going to choose Hair Space. When I do that, InDesign actually places a special width Hair Space in between those two characters. Now there are other ways to add and remove space between characters, such as Kerning and I'm going to be talking about that in the later chapter. But it's great to know that InDesign has the special characters to use, if you want to use them. Of course many of the fonts that you're using, have special characters built into them, Ornaments and Math symbols and so on, but you may not know how to type them.
Fortunately, InDesign has a special feature called the Glyphs panel and I can find that under the Window menu, or the Type menu. Here's the Glyphs panel, and the Glyphs panel shows me every character that's inside my current font. It's really quite incredible. You can just go through and scroll through this list. I'm going to make this even a little bit bigger, so we can really see this characters. You can scroll through this list and see all the different characters that are inside this font, and some of these things I would have no idea how to type, I don't even know what some of these are. Now for this document, I'd like a place a special ornaments just before the P in this word Pittinger.
So I click there and now I'm going to change my font. I can change it right here inside the Glyphs panel if I want to. I'll select that font and replace it with let's say Wingdings. I just had to type a few letters WIN and it guessed that I want Wingdings. Now I'll hit Return or Enter and we can see all the different characters inside the Wingdings font. This one looks nice, so I'll double-click on it and you can see that InDesign places that character right wherever the cursor was. InDesign also places that cursor up here in the Recently Used list and that's kind of cool, because I might want to use that same character over and over again.
I might come up here and click before the E. All of a sudden, all of these characters change because it's back to representing what this font is, wherever the cursor is, the Myriad Pro Font. But it still keeps my Recently Used glyph up here. So I can double-click on it, and it automatically adds it and changes the font. Now Wingdings and symbol fonts like that, and many of the Pro fonts from Adobe have a lot of special characters in there. Check them out, take a little time to go through and just scroll to the Glyphs panel and see what kind of treasures are hiding in there.
Author
Released
5/7/2012- Getting started in just 30 minutes: the quick start guide to InDesign
- Understanding your workspace
- Creating and setting up new documents
- Creating and applying master pages
- Entering and editing text
- Placing graphics
- Working with color and gradients
- Editing frame and path shapes
- Working with layers, objects, and groups
- Rotating and scaling objects
- Applying character and paragraph formatting
- Using styles
- Creating and formatting tables
- Exporting to EPUB and interactive PDF
- Packaging, printing, and exporting your final document
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
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Q: Where can I learn more about graphic design?
A: Discover more on this topic by visiting graphic design on lynda.com.
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What is InDesign?1m 23s
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Introduction
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Welcome57s
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Using the exercise files1m 38s
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1. Learn InDesign in Thirty Minutes
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Getting started3m 33s
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Adding or editing text3m 23s
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Adding or replacing graphics4m 31s
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Moving objects around4m 55s
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Printing and creating a PDF4m 57s
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2. Understanding Your Workspace
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Working with panels3m 58s
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3. Creating a Document
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Creating new documents7m 39s
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4. Managing Pages
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Changing page size4m 38s
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Overriding master page items2m 43s
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Adding page numbering2m 22s
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5. Text
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Understanding text frames3m 38s
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Typing and editing text4m 48s
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Importing text3m 47s
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Threading text frames3m 12s
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Setting text frame columns4m 31s
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Putting text on a path5m 50s
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Using the Story Editor5m 10s
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Checking spelling5m 12s
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Using Find/Change4m 45s
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6. Graphics
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Importing graphics8m 20s
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Using the Links panel7m 17s
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7. Formatting Objects
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Selecting objects5m 2s
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Colorizing images1m 59s
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Adjusting transparency4m 4s
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Adding drop shadows3m 33s
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8. Color
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Creating color swatches4m 33s
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Creating gradient swatches3m 53s
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Applying gradients4m 22s
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9. Frames and Paths
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Creating text outlines4m 12s
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10. Managing Objects
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Stacking objects2m 5s
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Grouping and locking objects3m 10s
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Nesting objects3m 23s
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Understanding text wrap5m 51s
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Using anchored objects6m 13s
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11. Transforming Objects
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Duplicating objects5m 37s
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Rotating objects2m 22s
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Scaling objects4m 21s
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Skewing objects1m 8s
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Mirroring objects3m 50s
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12. Character Formatting
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Changing case3m 23s
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Using Find Font3m 54s
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13. Paragraph Formatting
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Using drop caps3m 26s
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Setting tabs7m 36s
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Adding automatic bullets4m 10s
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Numbering paragraphs6m 10s
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14. Styles
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Using character styles4m 45s
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Using object styles2m 47s
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15. Tables
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Creating a table4m 29s
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Adjusting rows and columns4m 36s
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Formatting a table4m 32s
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Formatting cells6m 2s
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Applying table styles5m 33s
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16. Long Documents
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17. Interactive Documents
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Exporting EPUBs6m 12s
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Creating an interactive PDF12m 49s
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Building a Flash SWF4m 7s
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18. Packaging, Printing, and Exporting
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Packaging for output3m 34s
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Using the Print dialog box4m 52s
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Printing a small booklet2m 46s
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Exporting a PDF7m 56s
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Exporting text3m 27s
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Conclusion
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Next steps1m 25s
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Video: Inserting special characters