Script faces

For example, very few script faces can be set in all caps. Most just weren’t designed to be used this way, and some of the more exotic forms used for script capitals can be unrecognizable without the accompaniment of more familiar lowercase forms to provide some context. Exceptions to the rule are faces such as Impress and Dom Casual, which were designed as advertising faces and derive from the kind of lettering—often in all caps—that you see in hand-painted supermarket signage.

Joining script faces

So-called joining script faces—whose characters actually connect—are the trickiest to deal with, even though they’d seem to all but eliminate the use of most of your typographic armaments, such as spacing adjustments. Roundhand faces, which imitate elegant formal handwriting, are a good example of joining faces. The connections between characters in these faces effectively make the entire word a single ligature, which means that you can’t adjust their tracking very much, if at all. If their spacing gets too loose, the letters disconnect; if you tighten tracking too much, adjoining characters will overlap instead of merely abutting. For the same reason, you can never set joining scripts with justified margins—the stretching and squeezing needed to fill justified lines will make hash out of these faces’ carefully calibrated spacing.

Consequently, there’s no need to kern lowercase characters in joining script faces. On the other hand, you’ll almost always need to kern the spaces between capitals and the lowercase characters that follow them (shown in this album cover). Because all the lowercase characters connect, the gaps after capital letters look extra large, as seen in Prokofiev’s name. Romeo and Juliet were thoughtful enough to have initial caps that have connecting forms, at least in the face used here, Embassy.

Before ©COLORBYTES 1992

after kerning type

The often loopy, flamboyant forms of script faces also oblige you to look for spacing problems in places you’d normally ignore, such as around the ampersand in the album cover type. The swerving shape of the Embassy ampersand makes it appear to lean away from Romeo and reach out to tickle Juliet. Restoring typographic decorum demands kerning the ampersand away from the latter and toward the former. You don’t normally have to worry about kerning against word spaces, but in script settings it happens all the time. Script faces play by their own rules and we’re all obliged to follow along.

Get that calligraphic slant

Most typeset characters are content to contain themselves within the bounds of the normal em square in which they’re constructed, but not joining script characters. To get that calligraphic slant and have all the characters “link hands,” one character has to overlap the next. Here, we’ve selected a single character to highlight the bounding box of such script characters and show how peculiar the spacing of these faces really is.

Snell Roundhand (top) and Lucia (bottom) samples

For a joining script face, the inclined characters have been constructed to overlap each other in order to connect. Because typesetting programs align characters at the margin according to the edges of their bounding boxes, tricky alignment issues arise in flush-left or -right settings. In midline, this overreaching doesn’t have much practical impact for the typesetter, but at either end of the line, this method of constructing characters can affect margin alignments.

Typeface designers have two possible strategies when it comes to accomplishing this overlapping. For example, Snell Roundhand (the top sample) could be called left-handed because the overhanging parts of its characters occur on the left side of their bounding boxes. By contrast, Lucia (the bottom sample) is right-handed: The overhanging parts of its characters extend beyond the right-hand side of the bounding box. Both accomplish the same end, but with the result that Snell will hang out beyond the left-hand margin when it starts a line, and Lucia can be a struggle to align flush-right if a line ends with a character (such as one with an ascender) that leans far out of its bounding box. In such cases, you’ll be obliged to manipulate the horizontal position of such lines using left and right indents to get them to appear properly aligned.

Lastly, most roundhand script faces don’t work well in small sizes. Many of these faces started life as engraver’s faces and were never meant to be used in tiny sizes. In computer settings, they become spindly as their point size decreases, and any kind of competition with the background (tints and patterns, for example) makes them very hard to read. Even in the large sizes used in the sample album cover, I chose to stroke the characters in black to give them some contrast against their busy photographic background. Reversed script type (set white on black) in small sizes tends to break up, as the black ink invades the super thin strokes. In this, they’re like italics, only worse!

From the days of the first incised cuneiform tablets, text has been written—then printed—in straight lines. Our whole system of page layout, of text composition, of the shapes of the alphabet’s characters themselves, assumes a straight, horizontal baseline. Computers may have liberated us from the tyranny of the straight line, but they haven’t freed us from the laws of legibility and readability. Getting loopy type to look good isn’t automatic.

The most obvious problem when type goes nonhorizontal—even on a straight baseline—is that you have to turn your head to read it. This turns out to have cultural dimensions, as European readers—who are accustomed to reading the spine type on books in a library from bottom to top—are more comfortable reading type going “uphill” than Americans, whose habit of reading spine type from top to bottom makes them more comfortable reading type going “downhill.”

The greatest challenge
But that’s really a design issue. From a typographical point of view, curving baselines mount the greatest challenge, because in addition to head-craning readability issues, curving baselines wreak havoc on the spacing between characters. In the InDesign Type>Type on a Path>Options dialog, you can control how a line of type cleaves to a path. Here you can do a lot of clever and mostly useless things—tricks you may use once but that generally don’t bear repeating. These include all of the choices in the Effects pop-up menu, except for Rainbow, which is the one we’ll talk about here. When using Rainbow, the effect is like bowing a normal baseline, with the stems of the characters rising from it at right angles.

Stick to Align: Center for decent character spacing

The most important choices in the Type on a Path Options dialog are in the Align and To Path drop-down menus. In Align, you can opt to have your type stand up on the path (the Baseline option), hang down below the path (Ascender) or above the path (Descender), or have the path pass right through the centerlines of the characters (Center). Characters standing on the path have normal spacing where they meet the baseline, but their tops get bunched up on concave baselines and spread too far apart on convex baselines. When you choose to have the ascenders align with the path, spacing at the baseline of the characters closes up on convex baselines and spreads apart on concave baselines. The results in all of these cases are bad. You’ll get the most natural character spacing if you select Center from the Align menu and, if necessary, Center from the To Path menu.

Here, the top sample shows type that’s set base-aligned to an elliptical path. In the sharpest parts of the curve, character spacing is badly distorted. The middle sample is set top-aligned with the curve, which badly pinches the bottoms of the characters in the tight convex curves. At the bottom is the happy medium: vertically centering the type on the curved path. Using baseline shift to raise the text a couple of points relative to the path improves spacing even more.

Note: The To Path menu only comes into play when the path your type is following has been stroked, that is, given width and color; otherwise, it has no top, center, or bottom to align to.

Better overall spacing
Even if you use Align: Center, you’ll still have to do some hand kerning—and possibly some tracking adjustments—where the curves of the path are the sharpest. But there will be far less mopping up to do than with any other alignment option.

Another trick to assure better overall spacing is using the Baseline Shift control in the Control panel to make micro adjustments to the type’s alignment relative to the path. Just make sure you have all of the text selected before adjusting this value. Raising the type a couple of points above where the Center command places it can provide substantially more natural spacing, even in tight corners.

It’s inevitable that in tight bends, your type will get looser or tighter, depending on whether the bend is concave or convex. In these places, use your tracking controls to tighten or loose the overall spacing of words or phrases to establish an even spacing feel throughout the whole text passage. Even after adjusting tracking, some hand kerning will likely be needed.

Choosing the typeface
Lastly, the typeface you choose for arcing type makes a big difference in its final look. In general, sans-serif faces fare better than serif faces; all caps text (because the letters have a consistently blockier profile) fare better than caps and lowercase; and condensed or compressed faces tend to look better than those with a wide set width. Script faces may work on gradual curves, but those with interconnecting letters can either become disconnected or have their connection points overlap—not a pretty thing. Brush faces fare best because their characters are generally not designed to connect, and their calligraphic style gives you more flexibility with their spacing—every little kern isn’t as crucial.

Brush faces and nonconnecting scripts work particularly well on curved baselines, as shown here. Their irregular geometry hides some spacing flaws, and this sample needed only light kerning. Serif faces in particular need more kerning to get character spacing to look something like normal.

Filling gaps with spaces
Grammatically speaking, any break in the sense of a sentence is an ellipsis—this em dash, for example. In days of yore, as well as in parts of Europe today, points of ellipsis were used in the same way as an em dash, except to indicate an even more exaggerated break, as in the dramatic pause of an orator. In American English, though, points of ellipsis are used almost exclusively to indicate an omission amid a direct quote: a stand-in for text that’s been eliminated for the sake of brevity or clarity. By convention, they’re used in mid-quotation, or at the end, but rarely at the beginning. Occasionally, they’re used outside quotations, at the end of a sentence, for example, to indicate a thought trailing off . . . .

Points of ellipsis are comprised of periods, and their spacing is important both typographically and grammatically. Spaces are always added between the periods of an ellipsis, but how much space depends on what authority you consult. The most popular spacing options are ens (Words Into Type), one-third ems (Chicago Manual of Style), and one-quarter ems (Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers), the last of which are essentially the width of a regulation word space. As we’ll see a little later, quarter ems are the most practical choice.

The evil ellipsis character
Now, every font has a points-of-ellipsis character built in (Mac: Option-: [PC: Alt-0133]), but it’s close to worthless. First, it’s too narrow to excel at its job, which is to alert you to missing text. If something’s missing, there should be an obvious gap, right? Secondly, when points of ellipsis come at the end of a sentence, the rules of grammar say you have to add a sentence-ending fourth period. But there’s no way you can add a fourth period to an ellipsis character and have its spacing match that of the other three dots. If you set it closed-up (that is, with no space), its spacing is too narrow. In InDesign, if you use the narrowest fixed space—a Hair Space—between ellipsis and period, it’s better, but still too close. And if you use the next-largest space—a Thin—it’s too wide. This bad spacing can be particularly apparent in webpages, where the low resolution of the screen display exaggerates bad character spacing to begin with. (Note: To find the fixed spaces in InDesign, go to Type>Insert White Space.)

Worse yet, in some typefaces, the dots of the ellipsis character are not the same size as the periods. So not only will the spacing of a four-dot ellipsis be bad, but the dots won’t even match.
The only possible role for this ellipsis character is in display type, where tight spacing is the norm. Set it closed-up, with no space between it and the text that precedes it. If you must use a four-dot ellipsis in a display setting, you can hand-kern that fourth period to get the spacing you want. But note that in very large point sizes, even the tight spacing of the ellipsis character may seem too slack.

On this book cover example, the ellipsis character can be used to good effect, because the large type complements its tight spacing.

The do-it-yourself ellipsis
As a rule, you should build your own ellipses. For the dots, just use everyday periods. For the spaces between periods, use nonbreaking spaces. To create a nonbreaking space in Microsoft Word, use Option-Spacebar (PC: Ctrl-Shift-Spacebar). In Adobe applications, use Command-Option-X (PC: Ctrl-Alt-X).

Nonbreaking spaces are included in every font and have the same width as normal word spaces in whatever typeface you’ve chosen. (As mentioned above, this is just about one-quarter em for text-width faces.) The distinctive feature of a nonbreaking space is that it’s not a legal place to divide a line, so using nonbreaking spaces assures that the points of ellipsis will remain as a group and not be broken up at the end of a line.

Now, by copyediting norms, points of ellipsis can appear anywhere on a typeset line, including the beginning. This means that it’s logical to separate the last word of text from the first dot of your ellipsis with a normal word space—this provides a legal place for your program to break the line. To keep the dots together and make sure they travel as a unit, separate them only with nonbreaking spaces.

If you’re using three-dot ellipses, as in the movie-review phrase “heart-warming . . . enchanting,” you’ll want the space after the third dot to be a normal word space too, again for linebreaking purposes. It’s when you start using four-dot ellipses that things get more complicated.

The spacing of a four-dot ellipsis depends on the sense of the text. A space before the first dot indicates that the preceding word is not the last word of its sentence. Rather, the missing text represented by the ellipsis is part of that sentence, and the fourth dot of that ellipse is the sentence ender. If the first dot of the ellipse is set closed up against the text, it’s a sentence-ending period itself, and the following three dots represent missing matter that followed that sentence. This is a copyediting distinction, but often, as the typesetter, it’s your job to assure this spacing is correct.

This brings up yet one more reason not to use the ellipsis character. InDesign, like most other text-processing programs, will break a line after an ellipsis character, just as it would after an em dash. But Web browsers will also break a line before an ellipsis character, even though it’s not preceded by a space. This means that if you create a four-dot ellipsis that starts with a period, in a browser display you could end up with a broken ellipsis, with the period at the end of one line, and the ellipsis character at the start of the next line. Bad.

In the print sample here, the spacing problems created by the ellipsis character in the upper example are apparent: in its three-dot form it’s too wimpy, and when a period is added, it isn’t spaced properly. The lower sample shows well-formed, hand-built ellipses.

When the same text is viewed in HTML format in a browser, more problems arise: one four-dot ellipsis comes apart at a line ending, and in the second, the period used to create it is obviously a different size.

Automated help
Making your own points of ellipses isn’t that much work, but it would be nice if Adobe programs offered some easy way to save such complex text composites for future use. Libraries don’t work for text morsels like this. A good solution is a utility program I’ll call a “Clipboard enhancer,” which can hold all kinds of bits for later use, saving them to disk or holding them in memory simultaneously. (Normally, when you Copy something to the Clipboard, it overwrites whatever was there before.) Among the many such programs available, Mac users can take a peek at CopyPaste Pro (www.scriptsoftware.com), while PC users have a freeware option in AccelClip (www.flexigensoft.com).

There are many reasons why centered type often doesn’t look that way, and the fix is usually visual rather than mechanical. It’s a truism of typography: If it doesn’t look right, it’s not right—even if your accurate-to-a-micron program says so. This conflict between what your eyes see and what your software says is probably most obvious in the case of centered type.

Before we launch into corrective measures for program-generated off centering, let’s look at the principal cause of operator-induced imbalances.

Misplaced word spaces
When you create a centered block of type, you want it to have a nice shape, an aesthetically pleasing variation in the lengths of the lines. This usually doesn’t happen by itself, and the fix is to hard-end the lines manually using Shift-Return (PC: Shift-Enter). This forces a line break without starting a new paragraph. But when you do this, the word space at the end of the line can easily get pushed to the next line, where it will create a one-word-space indent, pushing the line off-center to the right. This is alarmingly easy to do without noticing, and it’s amazing how often you’ll see this in print once you start looking. It may take a second glance to notice that the third line of this Thomas Paine quote is off-center to the right.

An important thing to note is that, although you may leave a word space at the end of a line when hard-ending lines like this, InDesign will not take that space into account when centering the line. Even though your cursor shows that the space is there—and you can even select it—it doesn’t affect the centering of the visible type. The same cannot be said, however, for a word space that starts a line. To quickly check for those misplaced spaces, quadruple-click with the text cursor in the centered paragraph (to select the entire paragraph) and look for highlighted spaces in untoward places. As shown here, a misplaced word space at the beginning of the third line is the culprit.

Measures right, looks wrong
Most likely, though, apparent bad centering results from design choices or simple optical illusions.

In the design category, a leading culprit is putting a centered heading over flush-left text. Because the ragged right-hand margin of flush-left text holds a lot of white space (particularly if hyphenation is limited or disallowed), a centered heading will always look off-center to the right.

So instead of centering your heading across the entire measure of the column, you want to center it over the “apparent measure.” To find this, align a vertical ruler guide with the end of the shortest line in the flush-left text. The apparent right-hand margin of the text will be about halfway between this ruler guide and the true right-hand margin. The distance between this halfway point and the ruler guide is about the amount that you have to indent your heading from the right to get it to appear centered.

This recipe, of course, works best for the numerically oriented. For the visually confident, just nudge the heading to the left using the Paragraph/Right Indent field in the Control panel until it looks centered. It’s best to do this with guides and frame edges hidden, so all your eye has to work with is the text. Other visual points of reference don’t appear on the printed (or online) page to mislead your eyes.

Where this effect creates the thorniest problems is in tables. Centered headings in text tables rarely look centered unless the tab entries below them are also centered. Flush-left, justified, or decimal-aligned entries will all tend to make centered column headings look off-center. In this “before” table the column margins have been highlighted to show that the column headings are mechanically centered, even though they look wrong above flush-left columns.

In these situations, the best solution is to complete the table and leave the heading cells blank (use an em space as a place-holder, if you like). Then, only after you have all of your gutters balanced and the table entries look properly positioned, you can go back and add your headings. They’ll look bad, but using right indents (for justified or flush-left columns) or left indents (for decimal-aligned columns), you can nudge them into better positions. Some of them will never look perfect—this is a game of visual compromise. Here, we’ve applied right-hand indents to push those heads into visually centered positions.

An italic title over roman text (even if it’s justified) can also look off-center, simply because the characters are all leaning to the right. The larger the type, the more dramatic this effect can be. Again, the solution is to apply an indent to push the centered text to the left.

Character issues
When your program is centering type, it’s making its calculations based on the widths of the characters in each line. But there’s no way it can appreciate that some characters have very little mass on the page, and these visually carry little more impact than an empty space. When such a graphically weak character appears at the end of a line, it seems to push the line slightly in the opposite direction. (Imagine what the line would look like if the character were the same color as the background.)

Although many of these visually weak characters are punctuation marks, such as commas and periods, they take up a surprising amount of space. A period and its side bearings, for example, account for about a quarter of an em in a typeset line. Double-quotation marks take up about half an em. And an em dash, of course, occupies a full em of space, as do points of ellipsis (…). When characters such as these appear at the end of a line, those lines will likely look off-center, because such a line’s center of gravity—so to speak—is shifted away from the weak character.

Quotation marks are the most common culprits. In this pull quote, the graphic weakness of the quotation marks makes the first line look off-center to the right and the third line look off-center to the left. [Insert pull quote.pdf]—crop, if needed

In these cases, indents—which are Paragraph attributes in Adobe programs—are of no help, unless you end each line with a return, making a separate paragraph of each line. The alternative is to use Shift-Return (PC: Shift-Enter) to hard-end the lines and use fixed spaces (thin spaces, at one-eighth of an em, should suffice) to pack the other end of the afflicted lines to make them look centered.

Just say “no” to hyphens
One last bit of advice is to avoid hyphenation in centered type. First of all, hyphens don’t look very good in such settings, although the occasional hard hyphen (as found in a compound modifier, such as English-speaking) at the end of a line won’t kill you. Still, it would be better to hand-rag the lines to avoid such an occurrence. In addition, hyphenation has the effect of making the length of the lines more uniform in a block of text and in centered passages, and this is probably the opposite of what you want. It’s the shape of a block of centered text that makes it interesting and provides the contrast between it and its surroundings.

Leading is an aspect of white-space management that gets far too little attention. Properly set leading is vital to harmonious page layouts and, more importantly, readability. It’s a key element in the even texture we call “good type color.”

Now, when I use the term, “leading,” I’m using the mainstream definition: the distance, in points, from the baseline of one character to the baseline of the line of text above it. The word comes from the lead alloy used to create the metal stamping blocks in handset type. The vertical dimension of the face of these blocks equals the point size of the type. The computer-type equivalent is the height of the bounding box that surrounds each character you set.

In computer type as in metal type, when you set lines of these character blocks one on top of another with no added intervening space, you’re setting your type solid. When you add space between lines, you’re adding lead. In a solid set, the type’s point size and leading are equal, for example, when 12-point type is set on 12 points of lead. This is typically written 12/12, pronounced “12 on 12.” Adding 1 point of lead gives you 12/13, or “12 on 13.”

Just say “no” to automatic leading
The first step to asserting control over your leading is changing the “automatic leading” value in all your programs. In the absence of a decision by you, this value determines what your leading will be, based on the size of your type. Never surrender this decision to a computer program! But since the “automatic” option exists, you may as well set it to a useful value.
Extreme leading is often used for artistic effect, as in this coffee-table book, but it’s not very useful for normal text. Here, 12-point Fry’s Baskerville is set on 24-points of lead.

In all Adobe programs, the default value for automatic leading is 120% of your type size. Sometimes this may be appropriate, but it’s like having a broken watch: It’s accurate twice a day, but useless the rest of the time. It’s far better to have “automatic” leading default to a logical integer value that’s the same as your type size.
With no documents open, open your program’s Paragraph panel, click on its menu (top right of the panel), and choose Justification. In the Justification dialog, change the Auto Leading value to 100% and click OK. Thenceforth, your automatic leading will produce a solid set. If you forget to specify a leading value, this has the merit of usually being more noticeably wrong than a 120% setting, which may be just close enough to being correct as to go unnoticed.

Getting the lead in
So what leading value should you select? Since there should be harmony among the proportions of all the white space systems on your page—tracking, gutter width, measure (and by inference, margin width)—the answer is, “It depends.” One thing to know is that in most cases, leading measured in whole- or half-point increments serves perfectly well. Using fractions finer than a half-point is really a case of splitting hairs, and is unlikely to accomplish anything.

The most important factor in determining a proper leading value is your type’s measure, or line length. Here’s a handy rule of thumb: When your type size (in points) equals your measure (in picas), a solid set usually works fine; for example, 12-point type over a 12-pica measure. When your measure (in picas) is twice your point size (in points), add 1 point of lead. When this ratio goes to 3:1, add two points of lead. This doesn’t always work, but it will get you close.
There are two reasons to increase leading as you increase your measure. First, the space between lines serves as a path to steer your readers’ eyes from the right margin back to the left so they can start reading the next line. Narrow leading makes this transit more difficult. Second, tight leading in a wide column simply makes the text block look gray and uninviting—suffocating.

The point size you choose makes a lesser difference. As point size increases, so does the amount of negative space in and around the characters. Both character and word spacing appear somewhat looser. The type appears to have more breathing room. This can allow you to use slightly tighter leading in large type. But generally, your choice of point size is related to the measure you use, which brings us back to the previous point.

A more important consideration is the choice of typeface itself. Most seriffed typefaces for text are so-called “old-style,” which have a moderate amount of contrast between their thick and thin strokes and work with the rule-of-thumb for leading outlined above. But so-called “modern” faces, such as Bodoni and Didot, have much greater contrast, with exaggerated thin strokes, giving them a brightness on the page that somewhat diminishes their readability. They also have large counters, the open spaces in characters such as o and a, which give them an airy appearance on the page. Just as these faces suffer from tight tracking, they suffer from tight leading, because this fights against the openness of the letterforms themselves. Adding lead helps.

Likewise, sans-serif faces used in text settings, as on this page, also suffer when set with tight tracking and leading. In this case, it’s because sans-serif faces are inherently somewhat less legible than seriffed faces (serifs provide visual clues for quick character recognition), so tight tracking slows reading. Along with the looser character fitting that typifies sans-serif faces must come looser leading as well.

A character attribute?
In Adobe programs, leading is nominally a character attribute set in the Character panel. But this is badly implemented. To see how badly, select a single character in the middle of a paragraph and double its leading value and you’ll see that the whole line takes on the leading of that single character. Bad! Your supposed character attribute is in fact a line attribute. If leading were properly implemented as a character attribute, doubling that character’s leading would simply push that one character down until its baseline was the specified distance below that of the previous line.

To move single characters up and down like this in Adobe programs, you have to use the Baseline Shift command, which is a half-baked implementation of true character-based leading.

Negative leading
Computerized typesetting introduced negative leading, where your leading value is less than your type’s point size. It’s rarely useful in body text, but it’s often handy in display settings. That’s because as point size increases, white space appears to grow faster than the characters themselves. As “normal” tracking looks too loose in large sizes, so does “normal” leading. As long as ascending and descending characters don’t collide, you can use negative leading to good effect in headlines and titles, especially in all-caps or caps-and-small-caps matter.

One last point: Nobody said leading has to be consistent within a single passage of display type, either. When one line of type lacks ascenders, for example, its leading will appear to be greater than other lines in the text block (as shown here). The absence of ascenders and descenders between the first two lines of the upper sample (set in 24/24 Bodoni Bold) make the leading seem wider than that between the last two lines. In the lower sample, the leading of the second line has been reduced to 22 points, creating the effect of more balanced spacing.
Negative leading in action

Likewise, a line with few or no descenders can make the leading of the following line look too slack. Don’t be afraid to select these lines and (using the so-called character attribute as a line attribute) tweak the leading until the spacing between all the lines looks even. Because in type, what looks right is right.

Key Concepts

To learn more about the following InDesign tools and commands used in this tutorial, visit www.layersmagazine.com/keyconcepts:

• Using the Character Panel: Font Size, Leading, Kerning, Tracking, Vertical Scale, Horizontal Scale, Baseline Shift, and Skew

Good typography comes from paying attention to scads of tiny details, the glorious whole being the noticeable consequence of many seemingly inconsequential actions. The tiny detail under the lens this issue is the ligature, a single glyph created from the fusion of two or more letterforms. These “weddings” are usually performed to head off the unattractive collision of adjoining characters. It’s up to ligatures to restore peace and harmony.

The pesky f hook
Most ligatures involve the lower case f, with its pesky hook, which has the habit of overlapping ascending characters to its right. The theory behind ligatures is that if these characters are going to overlap anyway, they may as well be designed to overlap aesthetically, by creating the f and its neighbor as a single glyph. The most common two-character ligatures are fi, ff, and fl. Common three-character ligatures include ffi and ffl.

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro with no ligatures (top)—the is look like water drops hanging off the f hooks; (bottom) Standard fi and fl ligatures as well as the OpenType discretionary ffi and ffl ligatures.

Although sans serif faces contain at least some of these ligatures (they’re part of the standard glyph set for most fonts), by tradition they’re rarely fused together visually as they are in serif faces. Rare exceptions include Matthew Carter’s Verdana (which has fused fi and fl forms) and Erik Gill’s Gill Sans (only fi).

Of the Adobe CS3 applications, InDesign has the best support for ligatures, as it can automatically insert ligatures from any font that contains them (most have at least fi and fl). To do this for PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts, simply select Ligatures from the Character panel flyout menu. To get InDesign to insert ligatures from OpenType fonts, choose OpenType from the Character panel flyout menu and select Discretionary Ligatures from the submenu.

Photoshop and Illustrator can only insert ligatures from OpenType fonts. In Photoshop, choose OpenType from the Character panel flyout menu, then Standard Ligatures from the submenu. In Illustrator, turn on ligature insertion from the Window>Type>OpenType panel (Shift-Option-Command-T [PC: Shift-Alt-Ctrl-T]). In general, you want to have automatic ligature insertion turned on at all times.

Smart ligatures
Although these compound characters are represented by a single glyph, Adobe programs cleverly keep in “mind” that they represent separate letters. So, when the word “waffle” appears near the end of a line, InDesign is smart enough to remove the ligature and hyphenate the word properly: waf-fle.

The same thing occurs when character spacing is altered. For instance, if you open up the tracking of a text passage containing ligatures, InDesign will drop the ligatures in favor of their constituent characters and open their spacing accordingly. The same thing happens when tracking is tightened, because otherwise the fixed spacing between the component elements of the ligature would stand out in contrast to the spacing of their neighbors. Ditto for justified type, where spacing has to be stretched or squeezed to fit type into fully filled lines. When a certain, rather small, spacing threshold has been crossed, InDesign will revert to handling the ligatures’ constituent parts as independent characters. Hand kerning can also cause ligatures to disappear.

You can’t assume that this automation always assures perfect results. Clearly, if your type program can break ligatures to justify type, you won’t have consistent ligature use throughout your text. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as aesthetic spacing is more important than consistent glyph selection.

A key exception is when justification or tight tracking causes adjoining characters to collide (loose spacing isn’t a problem). It’s most likely with the fi combination, as the “ear” at the end of the f’ s hook overlaps the dot of the i, making a noticeable dark knot in the text. And it’s one reason why some typographers—especially those who come from a tradition of metal, handset type—frown on squeezing character spacing to justify type. The fastidious should look (with the help of their trusty proofreaders) for cases in which ligatures should be restored where the program has removed them. The fix: Select both letters and open the tracking of the letter pair until the ligature reappears.

Ugly display
The bigger problem is in display type, even in sublines at sizes down to, say, 14-point. At this size, the inconsistent use of ligatures (now you see them, now you don’t) in a passage of type can become obvious. In these cases, make an effort—by manipulating kerning and/or tracking—to force the use of ligatures throughout (the preferable alternative) or eliminate the appearance of ligatures altogether.

Worse, though, are ligature problems in large type, such as titles and headlines. Tight tracking in headline type is the norm these days, often carried to extremes. When it comes to ligature situations, you can get away with tight spacing when using sans serif faces, primarily because the hook of a sans serif f tends to be narrower than in a serif face, so it’s not as likely to overlap an ascending character to its right—not so with most serif faces.

Unintentional ligatures—collisions between characters—are ugly in display type. Assuming that the troubling sequence of characters is unavoidable, the best solution is to use ligatures and adjust the rest of the type’s tracking to match the ligatures’ spacing as well as possible. Where house style mandates tight headline spacing, this may mean that the spacing of the ligature elements will look a little too loose. But this is better than having the ligature break up and its constituent parts engage in an unseemly “wrestling match.” When tight tracking is the order of the day, use manual kerning to open up the spacing of the would-be ligature characters until your program restores the ligature.

The dotless i
If tracking is so tight that the ligature’s internal spacing is distractingly loose, there’s one other alternative (editors willing): the dotless i ( ı ). This obscure character is included in nearly all fonts, principally as a building block for accented characters (ì, í, î, ï), but it can be used in display type when overbearing fs insist on mugging the dots of the is that follow them. This is most commonly done in ad type (where it’s normal to play fast and loose with the rules of composition and usage), but even in serious work, it’s occasionally just the right tool for the job.

On the Mac, the dotless i can be typed simply by pressing Shift-Option-B. On the PC, it’s more complicated: Open Character Map, check off Advanced View, and with Character Set set for Unicode, type 0131 (the Unicode ID number for the dotless i) in the Go to Unicode field. The dotless i will be highlighted in the character grid, and you can use the Copy button and your program’s Paste command to get it into your text. In any Adobe program’s Glyph panel—which has no search tools—you have to browse visually for this (and any other) glyph—something that really needs fixing.

Typefaces that imitate freestyle lettering aren’t usually very convincing. But a little creative “tweakery” can create a fresh and unique look to your informal type.

When it comes to setting type, I’m generally a law-abiding citizen…but not this issue. This time we’re going to break sacred rules, abuse glyphs, and toss logical alignment to the wind. Everything will be eyeballed, and any resemblance to graphic coherence will be strictly coincidental. The goal? To try to simulate a hand-lettered look with an off-the-shelf font, to produce a subtle lack of consistency so the characters don’t look like the cookie-cutter shapes they really are.

Alter shapes and orientations
InDesign and Illustrator give you several ways to alter the shapes and orientations of individual characters, and by combining these, you can create the impression that every character is unique. Here’s a list of the controls we used to customize the sample type:

• Font Size (Control panel)
• Vertical Scale (InDesign—Control panel; Illustrator—Character panel)
• Horizontal Scale (InDesign—Control panel; Illustrator—Character panel)
• Skew (Control panel, InDesign only)
• Baseline Shift (InDesign—Control panel; Illustrator—Character panel)
• Stroke: black outline to fatten, white inline to slim down (Stroke panel)
• Rotate (InDesign—Rotation tool in the Toolbox; Illustrator—Character Rotation in the Character panel)

The “before” display type (shown here) has been set in Bitstream’s Impress, a face designed to look like freehand commercial brush lettering. But as loose and free as the letterforms are, no one’s going to think they’re hand-drawn when they see identical consecutive letters, such as the “m,” “e,” or “l” in this ad. Making them look different is a first priority.

Let’s start with the two “m’s” in Summer. For the first “m,” we used the InDesign text Control panel tools to squeeze its width (Horizontal Scale to 82%), raise the Baseline Shift 2 points above the baseline, and give it a slight slant (Skew) of 2°.

For the second “m,” we’ll go in the opposite direction, bumping up its Font Size a bit, sinking it 1 point below the baseline, and using a backslant of –1°. To make it chunkier, we used the Stroke panel (Window>Stroke) to add a 0.4-point (Weight) black stroke to surround the character.

Varying character stroke weight is tricky
For letters that consist mostly of vertical strokes (A, l, r, in this typeface, at least), you can simply make their set width greater. But this doesn’t work for letters with strong horizontals (E and e, for example) because horizontal strokes keep their original weight while the verticals get wider or narrower. Character proportions can become seriously distorted.

Making characters bolder is easier, because you can use the Stroke panel to add an outline to them. But you can’t apply a stroke to an editable character that will make it thinner unless you first convert the character to outlines, using the Type>Create Outlines command. At this point, if you select the character outline, you can now choose how to apply your stroke in the Stroke panel: to the outside of the character’s outline (Align Stroke to Outside), centered along that outline (not too useful in this instance), or inside its outline (see “Stroked”).

To create a thinner version of a character, convert it to outlines, then apply a white (or “paper”-colored) stroke, and click the Align Stroke to Inside icon in the Stroke panel. This has the effect of trimming down the thickness of the character’s stroke by the weight of the stroke you’ve chosen.

Varying the baseline is another way to knock the stiffness out of type, even if, like Impress, it’s pretty loosey-goosey already. The idea is to use baseline shift to push selected characters up or down. A random wobble is best rather than any patterned or calculated alternation.

Stroked
InDesign can add a stroke to the outline of typeset characters that can be additive or subtractive. In this example, a lowercase Helvetica Bold “x” (top) has been stroked in three ways. The middle row shows in red the stroke position when it’s aligned outside the character outline (left), centered along the outline (center), and inside the outline (right).

The lower-left sample has been stroked on the outside with black, making the character appear bolder. The lower-right sample has been stroked on the inside with white, making the character appear thinner. The blue lines indicate the characters’ original baselines.

Animate the line
InDesign also lets you skew characters to give them a fake italic or oblique slant. Using a negative value (add a hyphen before your numeric value) creates what’s called a backslant. Again, the light touch is the right touch—the variation you’re after is that which you’d find in the range of normal informal hand lettering.

Rotating individual characters also helps animate the line and knock some of the stiffness out of the setting. We did this to the two “l’s” in the word “All,” with the first “l” leaning to the left and the second to the right. Alas, InDesign can’t rotate individual characters—you have to convert them to outlines first. Illustrator can perform this trick, however, from within the Character panel.

Even in a whacky setting like this, spacing is crucial, and you’ll notice our sample is heavily kerned. That’s because characters that have been converted to outlines lose their side bearings, so they need to be kerned to loosen up their spacing. Happily, when it comes to kerning, neither InDesign nor Illustrator distinguishes between normal characters and those that have been converted to outlines.

A word of warning
All of the above shenanigans are best performed on informal faces, such as those that mimic handwriting (for example, Tekton or Comic Sans) or brush-painted letters (such as Dom Casual, or Flash). Avoid using these techniques with script faces that have connecting letters because variations in stroke weight will seem out of place. And by all means, don’t apply them to text faces, because the result will make a big mess, and I refuse to be held responsible. Here’s our finished type in a poster
CREDIT: ©ISTOCKPHOTO/JAMES THEW

If you don’t want your small type to look like it’s hiding something, if you really want it to be read, it takes some extra effort, because all type programs default to settings for creating full-sized text. When you start setting smaller type than this, whether it’s for footnotes, contracts, legal notices, or the front and back matter of books, you have to make adjustments.

Typeface choice

If you’ve struggled to read a drug disclosure, you know that a light, condensed face for small type is bad news. What you really want is a face with a wide set width, that is, one whose characters are relatively wide. In addition, you’ll want a face with a generous x-height: one whose lowercase letters are rather tall. Below is a selection of faces illustrating this. All of these footnotes are set in 7-point with 9 points of leading. The apparent size of the various faces varies widely, as does their relative readability. The faces, from top to bottom, are Adobe Garamond, Bookman, Baskerville, Helvetica, ITC Avant Garde Book, and Antique Olive.

Likewise, faces with a heavier stroke weight and less contrast between the thick and thin parts of their characters are more legible in small sizes. Palatino, for example, holds up better in petite formats than Garamond, and both fare better than Bodoni.

Although Helvetica Light Condensed may be a poor choice for setting small type, Helvetica itself is not, because it scores high on all the previous criteria: big x-height, good color, and a wide stance. In fact, many sans serifs fare well in small sizes for the same reasons. In general, humanist sans serifs such as Gill Sans work better than a geometric sans, such as Futura or Avant Garde, because the shapes and proportions of their letters share more of a seriffed face’s visual cues to easy character recognition. Antique Olive is a face that was specifically designed for legibility (by Roger Excoffon, in the 1960s), but it’s sadly neglected today. With its lowercase letters that are almost as big as its caps, it stands up very well in small sizes.

Italics suffer particularly badly when set small. Ironically, they were first developed 500 years ago by Aldus Manutius as a way to cram more type onto a page, because their narrower characters saved space and paper for his popular cheapo editions. They looked crowded then too, and when you reduce the size of italic type, it can quickly start to look like alphabet soup.

Word and letter spacing

No matter which face you use, when setting small type you should loosen the tracking. Spaces between characters always appear to change size faster than the type they’re with: Just as type appears too loosely spaced when its size grows, it appears pinched as its size is reduced.

Depending on the setting, you may have to alter your type’s hyphenation and justification (h&j) settings as well. Often, loosening tracking to open word spaces enough will cause overall slack character spacing. In such cases, consider making the h&j Optimal value for word spaces more than 100% of normal. (“Normal” being the value established in the font itself.)

Leading and line length

You can’t reduce point size much without also narrowing its measure (that is, shortening its line length). For two or three lines, you can suffer a reader to endure small type over a long measure, but in longer paragraphs, it becomes too easy to lose track of the correct baseline as the eye moves from right margin to left. Generous leading helps. In magazines with image captions set at reduced point sizes, designers often leave the leading the same as the surrounding text type. This not only makes for easier reading, but it also makes it easier to align the captions to the page’s baseline grid.

Footnotes—especially lengthy academic ones—present a particular challenge because they’re normally set to the full width of the page, matching the measure of the text type. In these cases, generous leading is a must. Often, using italics for footnotes will allow for an effective contrast with the text type while allowing you to use a slightly larger point size than you’d be obliged to use for footnotes set in a roman type.

Background checks

The visual fragility of small type makes it extra vulnerable to other forms of graphic static, such as high color contrast. In addition, when small type is printed in a blended color (that is, not pure cyan, magenta, or yellow), the screening used to create that blend is going to cause a loss of sharpness more exaggerated than that seen in larger type. Any slight misregistration multiplies the problem. The result is fuzzy text that’s hard to decipher.

Avoid reverses—white type on black—when using small type, especially small italic type or typefaces with high contrast, such as Bodoni. Inevitably, the ink that forms the black background will spread slightly into the white type areas, thinning them and possibly breaking up thin strokes and hairlines. Proofing on a desktop printer may not reveal these problems, as these printers are less prone to ink spread than a printing press, especially on absorbent, uncoated paper.

Small can be beautiful

All type is meant to be read, even the fine print—although you have to wonder if the people who write the text necessarily agree. As always in typography, it’s the little things that count, and this is nowhere more true than in little type.

OpenType Pro fonts to the rescue (again)

For the 500 years that commercial type was set using hot or cold metal, it was normal for different sizes of a typeface to have different designs. Small types were wider, slightly bolder, with taller lowercase characters. In the 1960s, phototype introduced the possibility of using a single master character design to generate type in a range of sizes. Fonts with different master sizes (8-point for classified ads, 12-point for text, 18-point and up for display) were still made, but not universally used.
Desktop digital type made the problem worse, forcing everyone to use a single-size type master—usually 12-point—for type of all sizes.

The OpenType format has broken this limitation by allowing several fonts representing the same typeface to be bundled together transparently in the same package. Adobe calls these size-specific variants “opticals.” They’re found in a handful of Adobe’s OpenType pro fonts. A good example is Adobe’s Arno Pro (shown here), which offers five size-dependent variants: caption (6–8.4 point), small text (8.5–10.9 point), regular (11–13.9 point), subhead (14–21.4 point), and display (21.5+ point). The design of each is matched to the demands of readability in various size ranges. Designs for smaller sizes feature wider, taller, bolder characters, features that become less so as point size increases.

The only one of Adobe’s recommended optical ranges that Arno lacks is poster, which would normally kick in above 72-point.

These point-size ranges aren’t normative, though, and font developers are free to use whatever ranges they choose. A font could just as easily have three ranges, for example, covering small, medium, and large sizes, applied to point-size ranges of the maker’s choosing.

As of today, the complete list of Adobe Pro fonts including opticals is Arno, Brioso, Cronos, Chaparral, Garamond Premier, Jenson, Kepler, Minion, Sanvito, Utopia, and Warnock.

The problem starts with finding one at all. It’s not in any standard character set, and fonts including Symbol, Monotype Sorts, and Zapf Dingbats don’t include one either. Of the popular pi fonts, only Webdings and Wingdings offer them. The Webdings ballot box is a full em square, meaning that it reaches from above a typeface’s ascenders to below its descenders. That’s big, for a ballot box. Wingdings offers three models, which range in weight from normal to horsy to even horsier. These sit on the baseline and are more or less cap-height.

Ideally, you want the weight of the stroke of a ballot box to have some relationship to the weight of the type you’re using it with. Right away we’re in trouble. If you scale down the em-square Webdings ballot box to a reasonable size—two-thirds of its normal size—and raise it up to sit on the baseline, as a ballot box should, it gets pretty thin, as you can see here in the top example. All in all, a lot of folderol for a result of limited utility.

The thinnest of the Wingdings’ ballot boxes will work with heavier seriffed text faces (it’s the middle example), but it’s too bulky for most of the finer ones. The heavier models should be reserved for use with heftier sans-serif faces and bold and extra bold faces, as seen in the bottom two examples in the illustration.

Taking matters into your own hands

But how about that second ballot box in the list? The one that sits perfectly flush left and whose weight is balanced harmoniously with the type next to it. Well, I drew it myself, and indeed, the best ballot boxes are ones you make by hand. To do this, choose the Rectangle tool from the Toolbox in InDesign and click on your page to open a dialog where you can define the size of your ballot box—try about 80% of the size of your type.

In the Stroke panel, you can specify its weight and preview just how well various weights relate to the weight of your type. Once you’ve drawn it, you can cut-and-paste it into your text, where as an anchored graphic, it will act like part of your text. By default, it will sit neatly on the baseline. Once anchored in place, you can still select it with the Selection tool and change its size or weight.

Because you’ve drawn it yourself, this ballot box doesn’t have side bearings like most typeset characters, so it sits perfectly flush against the margin. This is a characteristic it shares with the Webdings em-square box, as you can see in the illustration. One disadvantage that custom ballot boxes have is that they can’t be used with the Bullets and Numbering controls in InDesign (found in the Paragraph panel’s flyout menu), which can automatically add symbols at the beginnings of listed items. To use a ballot box in a list, you have to use a symbol found in a font.

The spacing between a ballot box and the text that follows it is dependent on your layout, but the norm is a single word space (as with other items that qualify generically as “bullets”). If your setting has justified margins, you’ll want to make that a fixed space. InDesign gives you two options here: the Quarter Space, which is slightly narrower than a word space in most fonts, or what InDesign calls a Nonbreaking Space (Fixed Width). This latter is the same width as a word space, but it can’t be stretched or squeezed during justification like a regular word space. (It can’t be used as a line-breaking point either—hence its name—but that doesn’t matter in this case.) Both of these spaces are available from Insert White Space in the Type menu in InDesign.

Giving credit

Another common use for ballot boxes is in coupons that call for credit card numbers. If you’re satisfied with its weight, you can use the Webdings em-square box in this role. Just set a series of boxes with no spaces between them and tighten their tracking to a value of 60 (that is, minus 60 thousandths of an em) in the Control panel. This causes them to overlap precisely so there’s no doubling of the vertical strokes where they coincide. Don’t set these in a justified line, though, because their spacing will shift unless you’ve specified a value of 0% each for Minimum, Desired, and Maximum in the Justification dialog. The 0 settings assure that the spaces between the boxes can’t be flexed to justify the line.

If you prefer to use custom-drawn ballot boxes for your credit-card grids, create the series using Step and Repeat from the Edit menu. First select a single box, then open the Step and Repeat dialog from the Edit menu. Here, select the number of boxes you want to make, and set the Horizontal Offset value to the width of the box minus its stroke weight. Set the Vertical Offset to 0. Click OK, and InDesign will create a series of boxes that overlap by exactly the weight of their strokes, so there’s no thickening of the vertical, overlapping lines. Select the whole line of boxes and Group them (Object>Group), so they’re easier to handle. This array, too, can be inserted into text as an anchored graphic.

Because boxes for credit card numbers are often divided into clumps of four (like the card numbers themselves), you may want to create gaps in this array. If you’ve use the Webdings ballot box, select the ones you want to become gaps and use the Swatches panel to give them a color of None. If you used custom-drawn boxes, you can use this same device or use the Direct Selection tool to select individual boxes and delete them. Since they’re graphics and not typeset characters, the line of boxes won’t collapse to close up the space.

Keep in mind that if you need to typeset an “x” or a checkmark inside a ballot box, as shown here, all you have to do is set the character to the right of the box and kern it back to the left to superimpose it over the box. This works whether your box is itself a typeset character or a hand-drawn box of your own creation.

The vast majority of PostScript Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType (non-Pro) fonts don’t contain the numerator and denominator glyphs needed to make fractions. To make professional-looking fractions using these fonts, you have to scale and then position the numerals manually.

Virtually all fonts, though, contain three pre-built—or piece—fractions: ¼, ½, and ¾. These consist of a numerator and denominator that are scaled to about 60% of the size of regular numerals, and they flank a special character called a fraction bar. On a Windows PC, you can access them by holding down the Alt key while typing their ANSI encoding numbers: 0188 (¼), 0189 (½), or 0190 (¾). Apple never saw the wisdom of including these fractions in the basic Mac encoding scheme, so there’s no keyboard access for them on the Mac. You have to fetch them using OS X’s Character Palette (Edit>Special Characters) or an Adobe program’s Glyphs panel.

These piece fractions are a great convenience if they’re the only ones you’ll be using in a document. But if you need others as well, you’ll often find that it’s hard to get them to look the same, as you can see here.

Matching hand-built fractions (left) with pre-built, piece fractions (right) isn’t always possible: The Times fractions on top are almost identical but the Univers 55 piece fraction is noticeably bolder than its built equivalent, which is commonly the case.

If you have to use any of these piece fractions together with others, you’re often better building them all from scratch. That sounds worse than it is…because after you’ve built the first one for any particular typeface and point size, you can use it as a template to build others in a jiffy.

Finding the fraction bar The fraction bar ( ⁄ ) isn’t the same as the common solidus, or slash ( / ). For one thing, a fraction bar rests on the baseline (except in a handful of faces), so it bottom-aligns with the fraction’s denominator; however, a solidus extends below the baseline, where it typically bottom-aligns with a typeface’s descending characters. Another important aspect of the fraction bar is that it has special kerning characteristics so that numerators and denominators snuggle up against it more closely than they would with a solidus.

Finding the fraction bar on the Mac is easy, as it’s always been a part of the basic Mac character set: You’ll find it at Shift-Option-1. If you’re using Windows, it’s easier to find it using the Windows Character Map than using the Glyphs panel in InDesign or Illustrator, where you can’t search for a character by name, Unicode number, or glyph ID number. Nor do Adobe programs allow you to use a glyph’s Unicode number (in this case U+2044) to key in a code sequence to access a glyph. In the Windows Character Map (Start/All Programs), just type “fraction bar” in the Find field and the program will find it for you. Double-click the fraction bar to select it, click the Copy button, and then back in your program, paste it where you want it.

Fractions step by step

STEP ONE: To make a fraction in InDesign or Illustrator, first type the numerator, fraction bar, and denominator in a series without spaces.

STEP TWO: Drag a ruler guide down to top-align with the fraction bar. Now select the numerator and reduce its size to 60% of the size of the surrounding text (type “60%” in the Font Size field of the Character panel, and InDesign will do the math for you). Nudge it upward with the Baseline Shift control tool (in the Character panel) until the top of the numerator touches the ruler guide.

STEP THREE: Now scale the denominator to the same size.

STEP FOUR: At this point you’re close, but you’ll probably have to kern both the numerator and denominator a bit nearer to the fraction bar. Do this using your keyboard controls: Option-Right/Left Arrow (PC: Alt-Right/Left Arrow).

STEP FIVE: If you’re doing this in a magnified view (Zoom), it’s easy to over-kern. Remember that in text size, the numeral in a fraction is going to be very small—6 or 7 points—so print a proof to make sure that in kerning you haven’t crowded it too much against the fraction bar. Here’s our finished fraction.

Recycling your work To save this work for later use in InDesign, select the fraction and choose Export from the File menu. In the Export dialog, select Adobe InDesign Tagged Text from the Format (PC: Type) pop-up menu, give the file a name you’ll recognize, such as “one eighth,” and click the Save button.

Later, when you need it, you can use the Place command to bring this file back into a page, where it will appear in the correct fraction format. At that point, you can change the numerator and denominator as needed. (InDesign really needs a Library for saving complexly formatted text elements for future use.)

To save your fractions for later use when working in Illustrator, build them in a special file, from which you can cut-and-paste them into future documents—hardly an ideal system, but it works.

Note: When recycling fractions this way, if you change the typeface you’ll probably have to do some base-alignment and kerning tweaking. The sizes, though, should be okay unless the face you choose is bold or very light.

A quicker alternative There’s a faster way to make fractions with InDesign but it requires a little “bridge burning” by changing the specifications for how superscripts and subscripts are set. There’s not too much use of the latter (unless you write about CO2, for example), but superscripts are commonly used for footnotes.

If you don’t use either super- or subscripts, however, here’s the fix: Go to the Preferences>Advanced Type dialog and change the Size for both Superscript and Subscript to 60%. Now change the Position for Superscripts to 28% and for Subscripts to 1%. Click OK and from then on, you can just select a would-be fraction’s numeral, and in the Control panel, click on the Superscript or Subscript button to convert them to a numerator or denominator. Remember though that you’ll still have to tweak the kerning.

One problem with building your own fractions is that scaling down the numerals makes them a bit too light. Numerals intended for use in fractions—as in most piece fractions built into a font, or those used in OpenType Pro fonts—are made slightly bolder to make them more legible and more in harmony with the type around them. If you happen to be using a typeface family with a semibold weight, you might try using that weight for fractions within regular-weight type. Sometimes these appear a bit too bold, but often they’re preferable to fractions that are too wispy.

Whenever you set a tab in InDesign or Illustrator, you can choose to fill the void between the preceding text and the tabbed text with a leader. To do this, open the Tabs panel, select one of the tab stops on the ruler, and just type any sequence of up to eight characters in the Leader field in the Tabs panel. (You can find the Tabs panel either under the Type menu or by pressing Shift-Command-T [PC: Shift-Ctrl-T].) Eight may seem like a lot but among other options, this allows you to alter the spacing between leader characters by adding spaces between them.

Leaders can be creative
The possibilities for leader patterns are endless. Remember that everyday characters and symbols can become quite abstract when used in series. The samples shown here start with a simple series of Snell Roundhand lower case s’s, range through oddities from the Wingdings and Symbol fonts, and end with commonplace double-daggers and guillemets (a.k.a. angle quotes) from Times Roman. Tightening tracking to create a continuous ligature can often disguise familiar symbols.

To change the formatting of the tab leader, select it in the document (not the Tabs panel) and then use either the Character panel or the Type menu. You can also use your Glyphs panel (Type>Glyphs) to help you locate characters and symbols you would like to use. Just double-click a character in the Glyphs panel to place it in your document, and then copy and paste it into the Leader field of your Tabs panel.

Repeating or alternating characters can create some snappy and surprising effects

Stroke with style
From a decorative leader, it’s just a short jump to decorated lines in general. The Stroke panels in InDesign and Illustrator offer a variety of options for setting what in “typographese” are called rules. Dotted, dashed, wavy, multiple (or Scotch) rules, they’re all there. And they’re all pretty dull. To create rules with more pep, don’t use the Stroke panel—use Type on a Path instead and build your rules using characters from your fonts. Or you can even use both the Stroke panel and Type on a Path together.

This is just how our sample menu was to make. We set the border of the text frame around the menu with a triple 6-point rule using the Stroke panel. Then, after selecting the frame, a second border treatment was added by setting a parade of characters on it using the Type on a Path tool (which is nested under the regular Type tool in the Toolbox). Just click on the stroke with the Type on a Path tool and either type your characters or use the Glyphs panel to add them.

The characters in question are lighthouses from Adobe’s Carta font of map symbols. To get them to sit tidily on the center rule, open the Type on a Path>Options dialog from the Type menu. In the dialog, select Baseline in the Align pop-up menu and Center in the To Path pop-up menu.

You can alter the spacing of such characters using the Tracking controls in the Control panel or Character panel. If you have a hard time getting the first character in the series aligned properly, set a word space before it and kern that first character backwards over the space to move it beyond its natural starting point (just place your cursor in between the space and the first character).

Creating the little creeping snail leaders was trickier. Because I had no mollusk fonts on hand, I used Macromedia Fontographer (any font editor would do) to add a piece of EPS clip art to one of my fonts, and voilà, Shift-S became a snail, or in this case, l’escargot.

Type on a Path and a triple frame stroke create an unusual border in this menu. The marching snail tab leader comes from a font customized using a font editor.

Drop caps are a great spice for text-heavy pages. InDesign makes simple drop caps easy but typographically refined ones are more challenging. No matter what kind of a drop cap you create, the following techniques will give you maximum control.

Basic controls
InDesign’s drop-cap controls lie under Drop Caps and Nested Styles in the Paragraph panel’s flyout menu. Here you define how many of the first characters in a paragraph are enlarged, and how many lines deep they’ll be set. Text lines are indented automatically. Curiously, InDesign never tells you the point size of the enlarged initial cap. The Control and Character panels identify the point size of the drop cap as the same as the rest of the paragraph text.

A new control in InDesign CS3 allows you to compensate for descending characters (normally only J, unless you use a lower-case initial character). By default, InDesign scales your drop cap so its baseline aligns with the baseline of the last indented text line to its right. This makes drop caps with descenders overlap text on the following line. Checking the Scale for Descenders box reduces the size of descending drop caps so they’ll fit within their appointed indent.

This isn’t much of a solution. If you allow such a character to be scaled, it will be noticeably smaller than other drop caps in the text. If you manually create an indent to allow the descending character to set at its full size, that indent will be at least one line deeper than those for all other drop caps in the text. The lesson: Avoid using descending characters for drop caps.

Refining your results
InDesign can enlarge as many characters as you like for your drop caps, but for the rest of this article, let’s assume that you just want one character set large.

InDesign assumes that you want your drop cap to top-align with the rest of the type on the first line. If you’d rather it didn’t, place the text cursor between the drop cap and the following character, and type Shift-Return (PC: Shift-Enter). This creates a line break without starting a new paragraph, so your first line of type sinks down to the next baseline. More such line breaks sink it lower and lower.

You can also make the drop cap larger or smaller by selecting it and altering its point size—best done by using the point-size field in the Control panel. Because the values you see displayed don’t reflect the visual size of the drop cap, use a fractional point size (e.g., 12.2) for precise control.

To control the width of the indent for the text that runs around the drop cap, place the text cursor between the drop cap and the character that follows it and use your manual kerning controls: Option-Right Arrow (PC: Alt-Right Arrow) spreads the characters apart (enlarging the indent); Option-Left Arrow (PC: Alt-Left Arrow) makes the indent smaller. Using Command-Option (PC: Ctrl-Alt) with the Arrow keys increases the kerning increment tenfold. (Note: This increment is defined in the Preferences under Units & Increments.)

Flush left at last
In the past, large drop caps have always appeared slightly indented, because their side-bearings push them in from the margin. (Side bearings are slivers of space that flank most characters to separate them from their neighbors.) InDesign CS3 can compensate for this. Checking Align Left Edge in the Drop Caps and Nested Styles dialog causes the visible part of the drop cap to align smack against the margin. But some characters (particularly those with rounded left sides, such as C) will look better aligned if they extend slightly into the margin. You may also just want to let your drop caps extend into the margin for design reasons.

To move a drop cap beyond the margin, first place the cursor to its left and insert a Thin Space or Hair Space from the Type>Insert White Space menu. Then go to the Paragraph panel’s flyout menu and change your drop cap setting to affect two characters: the space and the initial cap. Now, with your text cursor between the space and the drop cap, use your kerning controls to move the drop cap to the left. The farthest you can move it is one em. Although InDesign’s Control and Character panels insist that the point size of your drop cap is the same as that of the rest of the paragraph, the em’s worth of kerning that you’re allowed is based on the visual size of the drop cap. This allows you to hang the entire drop cap into the margin, if you like.

More fancy kerning
This same trick is useful for adjusting just the first line of text so it snuggles up more closely against the drop cap, closing the often-distracting gap between the two. Again, the trick is to place a Thin or Hair Space between the drop cap and the first text-size character in the paragraph. Now kern the text back toward the drop cap. If you have a long way to go, the one-em limit will be too restrictive; in that case, add yet another space and kern back against that too.

This kind of extreme kerning makes it difficult to select characters in the first line. Say, for example, that you want to set the first few words of the paragraph in small caps. The best way to control your selection is to position your text cursor after the last character you want to select and then use Shift-Left Arrow repeatedly to select the characters you want one by one. If you simply try to click into the area of wide, overlapping kerns, it’s impossible to see where the cursor really is.

Here’s one more cool thing. If you need to apply some special effects to that drop cap, select it and choose Create Outlines from the Type menu. This makes the drop cap into a straight-ahead vector graphic. But InDesign still recognizes it as a character at some basic level, so your Drop Cap settings are unaffected, even though the first character in the paragraph isn’t really a character any more.

This drop cap uses only the InDesign CS3 controls in the Drop Caps and Nested Styles dialog. One character sits five lines deep and Align Left Edge pushes it against the margin. The indented lines crowd the drop cap and should be kerned away from it, but this is corrected in the next image.

The drop cap has been changed to Bernhard Modern Bold and enlarged from 12 to 14 points, creating better spacing between the drop cap and the text. The drop cap has also been kerned to the left to extend slightly past the margin.

The opening text-size characters have been converted to small caps and enlarged by one point. To make a better visual and logical connection, the first text line has been kerned closer to the drop cap.