Sometimes, when you change to a symbol font (such as Zapf Dingbats), you may encounter font substitution (the dreaded pink highlight). If a font doesn’t have a bold or italic version, InDesign will not change the text. Although InDesign won’t generate a bold or italic weight, you can type Command-Shift-B/Ctrl-Shift-B to make your text bold and Command-Shift-I/Ctrl-Shift-I to make it italic.
Note that you can also press the up and down arrow keys, which is especially helpful in the Style field to move from Regular to Bold to Italic, and so on.įont Style Keyboard Shortcuts. For instance you can type “T” and it will guess “Tekton” (if you have that font installed) if you meant “Times” then you may have to type “Ti” or even “Tim”. As you type the name of a font family or type style, InDesign will display the available font or fonts that match the characters you typed. To select a font family or type style, you can type into the appropriate field-you don’t have to use the menu. If you don’t have a font for a particular type style, you won’t see it on the Type Styles menu (see Figure 4-3). Note that InDesign does not have “type styles” in the same way that other programs do-it makes no assumption that the selected font family has a “bold” or “italic” member, and will never generate a fake bold or italic version. When you choose a font from the Font submenu of the Type menu, you must select both the font family and a specific type style. InDesign’s user interface for selecting fonts mirrors this approach.
In this book, we’ve used the font family Minion Pro, and the type style Regular for the body text-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 a little bit 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/Ctrl-Alt-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. 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.