InDesign Tutorial - Type

   In this session the focus was on laying out and structuring type in a document. We looked at issues in text like widows and orphans, and rivers and how to avoid these so that when we create our own documents they are formatted in a way that is easy to read and not distracting from the text itself. The first task was to create a publication on InDesign, what it was based on was not important as it was just to see how we would format text in a document initially. We were then told about some mistakes and issues that were visible in our work and how to avoid these.

  One thing we looked at was hyphenation in text, and using Paragraph Style options to select words to hyphenate and choosing how many characters to hyphenate after, as too many hyphens in a paragraph can look distracting and uneven. We then were shown how to set up a style to one paragraph bye going to Type - Paragraph Styles - Create New Paragraph styles - Name.

Another thing we looked at was indent and spacing and selecting space after 4 mm and choosing the left justified alignment. Then how to apply styles on text by selecting the text tool and clicking anywhere on the text and then selecting all. After this you hold down the control key and click on 'Subhead' to edit the subhead.  We then looked at Paragraph Rules and 'offset'. 

Additionally we were told how to wrap text around an image which I found useful. You select the clipping path around an object, select the text wrap window and then space it appropriately. To use these text styles and paragraph styles we set up a document using given text and images, that we had to place in to the document. 

This is one of the pages of the document in which a Paragraph Style has been used which can be seen as there are visible subheadings which are underlined and the style is consistent. Also visible in the top right hand corner is a 'drop-cap' which was created by selecting New Paragraph Style - Dropcaps and nested styles - lines 3 - 1 character - new character style - 'big letter'. 

We also learnt how to correctly use a Style to create a contents table: 

To do this we selected layout - table of contents- title - style: TOC title. We then added the Subhead style to this bit of text also. We were then shown how to create the dots - or 'Tabs' - between the numbers and page headings by creating a new paragraph style and selecting the type - tabs, and when doing the leaders we changed the leaders to a smaller type size so it looked neat. 

We then applied tabs also to another page along with the other created Styles.

Overall I found this session quite useful as I have not had much experience on InDesign, and learning how to employ Paragraph Styles in a document with multiple pages where everything has to be consistent is useful.