Skip to main content

Choosing Fonts and Editing Text

Lesson 4 from: Intro to Adobe InDesign

Jason Hoppe

Choosing Fonts and Editing Text

Lesson 4 from: Intro to Adobe InDesign

Jason Hoppe

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

4. Choosing Fonts and Editing Text

Choosing and manipulating type is the heart of InDesign and essential to any page layout. Jason demonstrates how to choose type, select text, format text, and use the text wrap feature. Learn how to use shortcuts to navigate with ease and efficiency, and increase your type know-how with an overview of formatting type size, lettering, kerning, and tracking. Jason shares valuable advice regarding how and when to format text.

Lesson Info

Choosing Fonts and Editing Text

in design is all about type and being able to place images and graphics and be able to work through and create publications large and small presentations. So type is a huge deal in in design, and they make it really easy to use. And they added even more features in this particular version that are going to make life that much easier and that much better. So one of the very first rules within design is every single time we're going to go ahead and do text. Every single thing goes in a container. I can't just take my type tool and simply click and begin typing something. I have to have a container, which means drawing a container. And then I can go. We in and I can choose my typefaces. I can do all the editing. We're going to show you how the property panel works so that we can get to all of these features. So we're gonna jump right down to actually creating text. Now there's a couple features and then designed that I absolutely love that we're gonna show you. I'm gonna start off with th...

e type tool because I would like to go ahead and create a text container to put my text Em I can't just collect doesn't do anything. I have to take my type tool and draw a container so that I can go ahead and I can begin to work with my type tool. Now, when I have my text container here, I'm working in preview mode and preview mode. Doesn't see show my margins and columns and all my frame edges here. It makes her a little bit nicer presentation when we're filming this. But that's the letter W okay. And W will go in and hide all of your frame edges and grids and guides and everything. And you can see that if we're trying to do this with a presentation, just gonna go back up to this page here. There's a lot of things going on here. It makes it really busy. So I'm simply working in my preview mode, which is W. So here's my text container that I just created with my type tool, and I get my flashing cursor right here. So with my flashing cursor here, I am gonna turn preview mode on here so we can see this a little bit better while we're doing our type. So there's my frame edge in this frame. Edge does not print drawn by container, there is my flashing cursor. Here's one of the things I love about in design. If you're new to in design or even if you use and design a lot, there's a lot of places where you can go for information. Right now, I'm working with my type tool and my text container. And if I right click inside here, this is going to give me my contextual menu with all the things that I need for this tool. An object combination. I don't have to go hunting for it. It's all right here. The reason why I show you this is because I'd like to put some text in this container really quick just to get us started. So I've drawn the text container. My cursor is flashing in there, right click to choose, filled with placeholder text. Now, a lot of these features I confined into the tight menu to I don't want to stop and go all the way up to my type menu. You're right. Click. There is everything. Great. There's the text container. You're going to be doing a lot of text editing, manipulation of the container, moving things around, a lining thing, selecting type. So we're gonna be switching back and forth between our type tool and are selection tool because we have two components going on here. We have the container, which we can manipulate, and then we have what's inside the container, which is the type when I'm working here, and I would like to move my container around once I put type in there. I need to go back to my selection tool. Now. My selection tool has two shortcuts. One is the letter V. And, of course, if I hit the letter V William and type editing mode, I get the letter V. So the escape key is when I, in my type editing mode with my type tool active, and I'd like to get back to my selection tool really quick. I click escape. Once I get out of type editing mode, you'll see now my selection tool. I can click on my container and I can move it around. I can pull on any one of the corners or anyone of the mid points and be able to resize my container and have the type of airflow to get into my type. Editing. Yes. I could go back to my type tool or hit the letter T Or simply take my selection tool and double click directly on my type. Container activates my type. Tool escape gets me out. Double click gets me in super fast to be able to do this. Now, in order to be able to go in and select some of this type here, I want to be able to go in and highlight the type and very quickly change it. Now, going in and selecting the type can be a real pain through here. And, you know, I see a lot of people try really hard to do that. Um, we're going to show you the shortcuts. Here. Here it is. I'm gonna zoom in and use my command space Born Zoom in so we can see this. Here's how it works. Type tool, double click. Select the word triple clicks Does the entire line four clicks. The entire paragraph and five clicks does everything. And when I say everything, that means everything in that container. Whether you can see all the type or not, because I want to be able to select it all if I'd like to format it all. So DoubleClick for a word, triple click for a line for paragraph five. Everything five is a lot. And so a great shortcut for going in and selecting everything in the container without clicking five times is going to be command A which is select all and that's edit Select all just in case. OK, types active or type cursors active, select all gets me everything in that container. I'm just gonna select the one paragraph and I click four times. There it is. And now I'm ready to go ahead and start working with my type properties panel here. I'm gonna bring that up, and here I have my type attributes my character attributes in my paragraph attributes. Now, this is only showing a small portion of this. You'll see this dot, dot dot I'm gonna pull the properties panel over here so we can get a little bit better view with this. I'm gonna click on the little dot, dot dot and this is going to give me all of my character formatting and my paragraph formatting. There's all of my paragraph formatting. This takes up a lot of space, but it's super useful because it shows us everything. So my type is selected with the type tool I go to my character formatting I use the drop down menu now changes to the new version of in design. When I go in and I have my type selected, it actually will show me what it looks like with the selected text right here. And I no longer have to just run down and then choose a font and then go back in and choose another font. I have live scroll, which I can then just go over here and I can run my cursor over what this is and then use my scroll wheel and I can get right to what it is that I want to see right there with Life Scroll. I haven't clicked on a single thing. This is just running my cursor over this. So this is a super nice feature because it makes life so much faster to be able to go in and select that particular fun. And then I can go in and I can select the style if the font has multiple styles. Let me choose one that has multiple styles here. Go in. And this has multiple styles. Regular, bold italic. There it is. And whenever you use a font, it always puts Bill fonts that you've last used right at the top of your menu here. So you do not need to go hunting for them. Great features. What happens if you're looking for funds and you're not quite sure of what fonts you have? Well, another feature. As you go into your fought menu, you had little funnel, which allows me to filter by classifications. Are you looking for a sand sarah for a serif or a slab serif? Or a script or a block cut or decorative or hand done? Now, this is not just the fonts that you have in your computer, but it will filter them that way. You can also go to the little cloud icon here, and this will go ahead and now show you all the fonts that you have available to you through the adobe font kit. It used to be called type kits, now called adobe Fonts. When you log into Creative Cloud and you have paid for your subscription. You get all these fonts for free to use and activate in any of the adobe applications before you would have to go to the Web and then synchronize them with your file. Now, you can go to this little cloud here and click on this. I'm not gonna do this because it requires an Internet connection and load all the fonts in there. But you can click on this and show you all the ones that are available to you, and you can simply activate them right here. So if you don't have a whole set of funds that you like, you have thousands of your disposal. So definitely check that out. Big improvements in the front panel right there now, because we're dealing with type editing all the time. Lots of shortcuts to Dio. We have our type size, and we also have our leading here, and we have our current ing and are tracking here, and I can go into the drop down menu and set the sizes or use the up or down arrow. But you know what? Not enough time to do this. Shortcuts Shift command on the Mac shift control on the PC. And then, if you look at your keyboard, you see your period in your comic keys, which are also shared with your greater than in less than keys. So shift command greater than is going to increase your fought size shift command less than isn't going to decrease your font size. You'll learn this. It's true and the other adobe applications awesome. One problem there. When you do this, the defaults allow you the fonts to go up and down in two point increments, which to me, is too much. I want to go in one point increments, so we're going to set a preference here now. When we go win and we set our preferences, I'm going to go over to my in design menu on the Mac or under the Edit menu on the PC, go into preferences, and I'm gonna change my units and increments to get my default or my keyboard shortcuts toe work in the increments that I like when I do my units in increments. When you start up the default here, the baseline shift is going to be to your size and letting will be to your Koerting, and tracking will be 20. I set this to be one, which means when I go and use my keyboard shortcuts, it goes up or down in one point. Increments by current and tracking is a little bit less so I don't get his extreme cunning and tracking from every keyboard shortcut. By the way, this also one of the places where you can set your preferences for units of measure. If you launch in design, everything's done in points. And Pike is because it's publishing software and the few companies out there that still use points and pikers, magazines and newspapers. It's all publishing. So if you do find you get points in Pike is this is one of the places that you can go ahead and fix this. We can do it the properties panel, and we'll do that as well. I'm gonna click OK, and now want to use my keyboard shortcuts to go up and down in sides. Shift command greater than and less than will go ahead and do my point size. Can't remember that. Don't worry. When you get this video, you're gonna get this entire document and those showed shortcuts are all in there already written down so it's all good. So here we have our fought be able to go up and down in size. Next deserve letting, which is our space between lines again. I can go ahead and choose the size of letting or go up and down here. Shortcut for this option on the Mac Ault in the PC up Arrow is going to go ahead and tighten up the leading option are all down Arrow is gonna loosen up by letting super useful tohave. I have my current ing in my tracking here and currently and tracking is kind of interesting because when we get into Koerting and tracking here just a few basic things about this I'm going to go ahead and pick a typeface here that's going to look good. I'm gonna make this a little bit larger for my headlines so we can kind of get an understanding of what current ing and tracking really is. Shortness up right there now Koerting space between characters. When you get into really heavy duty, fought, use or become one of those graphic designers were tight matters, and it really does. I want to adjust the space in between each one of these letters now, I only do this on larger type doing in my body. Copy you're not going to see. But sometimes the spacing between the letters isn't what I want, which is called Turning Space Between characters. People confuse letting encouraging its simple to remember turning space between characters letting space between lines. If I want to do current ing on a headline, I can put my cursor in between here and I can adjust my current ing right here. A negative number is going to make it tighter. A positive number is gonna make it looser. A short cut for this option are all right. Arrow loosens it option are all left. Arrow tightens it up so I can go through. And I can equally visually space this out when I'm dealing with the headline So cool stuff. Tracking is the same thing as current ing, but it's over a large area of selected type. I may have type where the space between the letters is a little bit too great or a little bit too tight. So Koerting and tracking of the same things, tracking his right next door and again I can go ahead and I can tighten it up, which is just taking that space and tightening up the space is not stretching the type. Don't ever stretch your type and then loosen it up right there. So basic formatting stuff that you have. Same shortcut by the way, option writer left arrow tightens and loosens overall, when you have everything selected, tracking or cursor between the characters. Option writer Left Arrow is gonna do the space between the characters there. It is pretty good under the character formatting. We have more controls here, and this is what I call the No, no land stretchy type, making the type taller, making the type wider, Uh, not at all. And then we also have People are like, Oh, we can do italics. Well, here's one thing with in design you'll notice there is no fake bold and fake italics buttons. We've got basic stuff like all caps and lower case caps here, but no bold or italic people like, But what happens if I want bold? Well, if your font style does not have bowled in it, you don't get bold. You have to choose a different fun. But then it's like italics. People like, oh I can do this. Look, I can go ahead and make it look like a windstorm hit. Okay? This is not true italics. I call this drunk until t type. You know, it's like here, hold my beer. Watch this. No, nothing good comes of that. And it is called false all town italic. So you know what? I just call this. No, no land right here. Don't touch it. So basics of character formatting right there. Nice and simple. Being able to get through this really easy. Select the typeface, go through here and apply our options. And make that I'll look it. Zoom back out using I command zero so we can see what's going on with that. Great. Okay, so going through that what we just did is we went through and we showed you how to go through and add it all of your type. And so with that, we've been able to go through and see all of this editing our type. Now we want to go and add some color to our text, and then we're going to show you how to go through and do text draft as well. So go back here. I want to go through what? I'd like to add some color to my type. Well, if I would like to color all my type at once, I don't have to go. We went in there and selected with a type two Elikann. Select simply the container. And if I'd like to select the container here and fill just my type, I could go to my fill right here and I can click on the fill in my properties panel. Now if I don't pay attention and I simply click on a color, it's going to fill the entire frame or the container. They call it a frame. And the reason why it says that is because I have the choice of applying it to my container, which we're going to do in a short bit. We're gonna show you what text in set is or I want to color just the text. Now, keep in mind, I do not have the selected with my type tool, but I would like to color all my text, say, and red. So instead of highlighting all the text and doing this, I can do this with just my selection tool, which is great right there. So easy to go ahead and Dio and I can change that color at any point. Just make sure I'm changing the text here, and then I can choose whatever color I want. Now, as we work with this to, we're gonna be working with images and we're gonna have our images basically working there kind of not interfering, but we want them to kind of integrate with the text. I can't just take a picture and put it into my text. Everything needs its own container. So, unlike other applications where you just paste a picture in there that's not in design text as a container. Pictures have a container, and we're gonna get to pictures. So ever eso soon here. But what I'm going to do is I'm gonna draw container that I'm going to pretend is my picture. Okay. And with this, what I'd like to do with this container right here is I'd like to have it so that it has all my type wrapping around it, and it's like, Wow, it automatically does that. Well, okay. It may not. How do we set that? Well, guess what? Our properties panel here has our text wrapped features. And here's all of our little icons right here and we have no text ramp. And here's my nicknames for everything because I love nicknames. So we have our cell phone with window blinds, closed our cell phone with the window blinds open, the sun shining through s'mores and s'mores missing their pants. People like what? Well, okay, these are the first things that I think of when I think of the icons and people say, Well, why do you have these ridiculous names for these things? And it's like, Well, because you'll probably remember the ridiculous names and they'd be like, Oh, that's what it was. Yeah, So the real names for these things are no text wrap text wrap around the object are bounding box text wrap around the object, shape the jump and then the jump to the next column feature. Most of the time, we use the text wrap around the bounding box feature. Almost all of her images go into rectangles or squares. So it's gonna be around this that we're going to be working with this. I need more features here, so I'm gonna click on the more options button And then what I do is I set the force field. Okay, If you believe in the force, you're gonna have to because text rap has this little force field. The force field is that little kind of magnet magnetic repulsion that goes around. And wherever I put my container, it is going to force the text around. And I put my little force field or buffer zone around there, which works really good. So wherever I put text ins around this object, that text is gonna be forced away now with text ramp. Some people think, Oh, I need to put it on the text. No, actually, you put it on your object so the text wraps around the object. Should it be called object Ramp? It's called text wrap. So that's how we can run this around. Now, in the odd chance that you have some other shape that is not a rectangular square. Maybe you have a circle. I'm just gonna go into right object menu here, and I'm gonna convert this shape from a rectangle to an oval or circle right here. You'll notice that it wraps around the bounding box. The bounding box is a rectangle, but my shape is an oval or a circle. Well, I'd like it to wrap around the circle. Hence the next one in drone line here, which is the wrap around the object shape. Now, this is when I have a shape other than a rectangular or square, which is not very common. But if I want to do that, I could. And you'll notice when I have a shape. I only can wrap around one side because there is no top bottom left or right of a circle. But I can still do that same thing right there. Now, why would I use the jump feature here? Well, let me go back to my rectangle and we're gonna get this back here. How would I use this jump feature? Well, this jump feature is this. If I put my text my image container in the middle here, you'll see that I get the text rap on both sides and this is really bad formatting when you have to read through and jump over a picture. And where I use this is I may have a picture. That's fairly why that may not go completely around or it may not have allowed the text to go completely around this, so I'll get something like this. Here we go. So the text jumps here. Well, I don't want to go in here and set this and keep upping my left and right. Margins are my little buffer zone here. I'm just going to say, jump the whole thing. Which means it just comes here. It stopped and jumps the whole thing, regardless of the space on the side. So that's the jump feature right there and kind of cool. But those are basic text draft options. No wrap wrap around the object jump feature. That's what they dio. So text trap. Very important. We're going to use it quite a lot. Basic text right there. All good to go.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

InDesign 2019 Overview

Ratings and Reviews

- Emma -
 

Love this class! Very well explained, easy and clear instructions. The instructor is cool, knowledgable and fun. Very engaging. Highly recommend to those new to InDesign!

a Creativelive Student
 

Such a great class to get up and running with InDesign quickly. Straightforward, to the point, easy to follow and understand. Class materials also great reference.

Mark Choman
 

Just like Barbara (previous reviewer) said. Great class targeting the fundamentals to get up and running quickly.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES