How can you use InDesign's advanced typography features?

Paragraph and character styles are such a time saver. Especially with long documents. It allows you to format consistently and accurately across many pages and varied styles.

When I teach people how to build effective templates, I always start with Character and Paragraph Styles. Being able to format copy is so much easier with these tools on hand. And even if you don't get it exactly right initially, being able to go to these panels and edit the styles across the document is a work-flow lifesaver.

If you can get your writers to use only styles during content creation in Microsoft Word or whatnot, those styles can be imported and re-mapped to InDesign styles while placing the text document. This can be a huge time save if your writers applied the styles properly and did not use any local formatting. Sometimes I create style templates for writers and teach them to use the included styles such that the styles match up when importing into InDesign. This can be done by clicking within a story in InDesign and exporting as Rich Text Format (RTF) which opens in Word w/ styles intact. Watch out for Google Docs users though as that word processing software will delete all custom named styles.

Paragraph and character styles are such a time saver. Especially with long documents. It allows you to format consistently and accurately across many pages and varied styles.

Character and paragraph styles work like magic for consistent typography. Character styles tweak text attributes, while paragraph styles handle entire paragraphs. They're time-savers that keep your design looking polished. I always start setting up character and paragraph styles on my InDesign projects. Setting it up early on, helps me in my process of determining how the layout will flow, how big or small the types will or should be, how much space I can use on the layout.

I have my Glyphs window handy so I can find fractions and other special characters not accessible otherwise. As a catalog designer, these special characters are always needed.

I do find it a bit strange that nested styles are lumped in with drop caps I can’t see any logical reason for this myself. I think it’s such a useful function but seems to be slightly hidden.

When using text wrap and runaround, watch out for ugly ragging and pigeon holes within the type. You can use the Justification Options to adjust minimum and maximum values for word spacing, letter spacing, and glyph scaling in order to give the paragraph composer more leeway for balancing each line of text. If those adjustments still don't work well for balancing line rags, you can switch to the single line composer and adjust word/letter spacing & glyph scaling manually for each line (in a typography emergency).

There’s already some useful GREP expressions built in to inDesign my fav being find multiple space and change to single space. Super handy.

GREPS are magic! If you want to automate specific text styling or need to find and replace something too complex for Find and Change. Learn about GREPS. They are incredibly versatile and are one of the most powerful tools in InDesign, in my opinion.

Using the built-in GREP expression for phone numbers has been a huge help when working on proposals with a lot of other companies and their contact information in the mix.

I always use a GREP style to apply a "no break" character style to the last 15 (like this: .{15}$ ) or so characters of a paragraph or heading. This is useful for reducing typography runts where maybe only one word of a paragraph or heading is on the last line. Runts are really bad typography design, so a global fix in the style sheet is extremely useful.

Remember you can align text to the base line grid to make it more effective. Put the distance of the grid to half of the leading of your text give you more flexibility and keeps your text consistent and harmonious.

Master or Parent pages A parent page (previously known as master page) is like a background that you can quickly apply to many pages. Objects on a parent page appear on all pages applied. Parent page items that appear on document pages are surrounded by a dotted border. Changes you make to a parent page are automatically applied to associated pages that commonly contain repeating logos, page numbers, headers, and footers. They can also contain empty text or graphic frames that serve as placeholders on document pages. A parent item cannot be selected on a document page unless overridden.