InDesign’s user interface for selecting fonts mirrors this approach.
#INDESIGN WINDOWS KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS PRO#
In this book, we used the font family Minion Pro, and the type style Regular, so the font of the body text is “Minion Pro Regular.” A font family is a set of typefaces designed to have a common “look.” A “font,” then, is specified by its font family and type style. To InDesign, fonts are categorized as font “families,” and each family is made up of one or more type styles. Selecting a font in InDesign is different than selecting a font in most other page layout programs. If the panel is already open, but is displaying the paragraph controls, press Command-Option-7/Ctrl-Alt-7. To display the Control panel, press Command-Option-6/CtrlAlt-6. If the panel is already visible, InDesign hides it you may need to press it twice.
To display the Character panel and shift the focus to the panel’s Font field, press Command-T/Ctrl-T. The controls in the panels are substantially the same, so we’ll discuss them once.įIGURE 4-2. InDesign’s character formatting controls are found in both the Character panel and the Control panel (see Figure 4-2). In addition to these distinctions, InDesign’s paragraph styles can include character formatting, but apply to entire paragraphs. Leading, for example, is really a property that applies to an entire line of text (InDesign uses only the largest leading value in a line), but we’ll call it “character” formatting, nonetheless, because you can apply it to individual characters. There are areas of overlap in these definitions. Tab settings, indents, paragraph rules, space above, and space after are examples of paragraph formatting. We refer to all formatting that can be applied to a selected range of text as “character” formatting, and refer to formatting that InDesign applies at the paragraph level as “paragraph” formatting. (Longtime QuarkXPress users won’t think of leading as a character format, but we’ll cover that next.) Font, type size, color, and leading are all aspects of character formatting. Character formatting controls the appearance of the individual letters in your publication.