[Macworld.com]

Looking for a little bit better text within InDesign? Here are a few tips regarding superscripts and subscripts and kerning, as well as an alternative method for creating drop caps. [more]

[kwill]

An easy way to get good looking type is to change InDesigns kerning setting from Metrics to Optical. Adobes Optical kerning self-adjusts the kerning based on what looks good to the human eye rather than the pure measurements of each character. This is not an absolute fix for text that needs to be manually kerned, but it will go a long way to having good looking text right out of the gatewhich makes for less manual kerning later. Just take a trip to the Kerning entry box in the Control Bar and select Optical from the drop down list.

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In my opinion, "optical" is better for large text and headlines, whereas "metric" is more legible for small text.

[9512721530]

how do you deal with a letter such as J, which is deeper than other lettters?

[Fixx]

That drop cap looks good. I still use v 2.02 and it does not place drop caps right (that is, flush left instead of leaving character contained extra space in the left, and drop cap height set to ascender height, not to x-height). Has this been fixed in CS2 or is this example image manually adjusted?

[James_Dempsey]

I made no adjustments to the images, they're just straight screenshots.

[James_Dempsey]

how do you deal with a letter such as J, which is deeper than other lettters?

I assume you mean when dealing with drop caps? If so, I don't deal with them. They are what they are and I leave them alone. That being said, you could adjust the vertical scaling if you wish. Because I always use this "hanging drop cap," I don't have to worry about letter height to begin with.

[MacKayaker]

Quark's solution for fractions was just as simple and didn't leave you changing settings for other things, so they are no longer what they are supposed to be; i.e. make these changes to subscript and it is no longer that.My other real gripe with text in InDesign is it's dealing with word spacing as a paragraph, rather than as a line. I find fixing paragraphs far more of a pain in InDesign as it is always thinking it is smarter than me, but not producing a result that is better. Quark allowed me to tweak a line without those tweaks affecting other lines, as it should be - InDesign is forever trying to screw around with my paragraph, so that what would have been a simple tweak in Quark to deal with a widow or orphan can become a major pain in InDesign because it seems to have it's own idea of what the paragraph should look like. If the later versions of Quark hadn't become more flaky, I wouldn't be having the issues with InDesign. Been designing text for advertising, catalogs, periodicals, and books for nearly 20 years. I still think I know what I want more than software has an ability to know what I want. To be fair, there are some things I like in InDesign, compared to Quark, but not too many - it's more a matter of making peace with the tools that work and I find CS and CS2 to be more reliable than the various iterations of Quark 6.

[snowcreative]

Quote

Quark allowed me to tweak a line without those tweaks affecting other lines, as it should be - InDesign is forever trying to screw around with my paragraph, so that what would have been a simple tweak in Quark to deal with a widow or orphan can become a major pain in InDesign because it seems to have it's own idea of what the paragraph should look like.

Just change the paragraph setting from "Adobe Paragraph Composer" to "Adobe Single-line Composer" and you can adjust each line separately without the whole paragraph changing.
What DOES irk me is that the superscript and subscript settings are document-wide, which is really stupid. This should be a paragraph setting. I'm really hoping this is changed in CS3. Does anyone know?

[alansky]

If you're a designer working in InDesign, why not use OpenType fonts, which include genuine pre-built fractions that require no tweaking? Using your method, you get correct alignment, but the fraction still looks funky because the weight of the slash doesn't even come close to matching the weight of the numbers.

[Daddymac]

You also might want to check your 'Glyphs' palette before monkeying around with subscripts and superscripts - very often there's more than a few fractions glyphs included in each typeface. They usually only include the standards - 1/2, 1/4, etc, but they're there if you need them.
EDIT: Oops. Just realized alansky suggested the same thing.

[snowcreative]

Quote

Using your method, you get correct alignment, but the fraction still looks funky because the weight of the slash doesn't even come close to matching the weight of the numbers.

The "real" fraction slash matches the weights better (option-shift-1). Use that instead of a regular slash.

[cpoff]

NOTE: HTML is enabled in this forum, rather than UBB Code.

So you should use the <blockquote> tag instead of [quote]

Cheers,Curt

[OM_user]

Here where I am we use Daniel Rodney's free ProperFraction javascript to get good fractions. It shows up in the scripts palette. All you need to do is select your "fraction", i.e. type 1/2 or whatever in normal text, select it, and double click the script and it's done. Perfect fractions every time.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect the script is setting the same parameters as mentioned in this article, but without changing the permanent preferences, in case you'd rather not do that.

You can find it here:
http://www.danrodney...erfraction.html

He's got a few other good scripts worth looking at on his site.

[MacKayaker]

Quote

Just change the paragraph setting from "Adobe Paragraph Composer" to "Adobe Single-line Composer" and you can adjust each line separately without the whole paragraph changing.

Thanks - I've read of it before, but not found it - but did this time. This should simplify my life. It looks like this is a document level setting.