In this Adobe InDesign intro tutorial, we'll show you some more fine points of typography such as picas, paragraph spacing, and tabs.
Video Transcription
Let's discuss some more fine points of typography such as picas and paragraph spacing and tabs. I'm going to create a new document to show this off here. The document will be an 8.5 x 11 letter size page, and I'm going to use picas as it is the default of InDesign. I want to explain why you might want to use picas and explain what they are.
I'm going to bring in some type here and do some spacing and setting up some tabs to set space between columns of text. I'm going to do 1 inch margins all the way around. Since the document is in picas, 1 inch is 6 picas. I can type in "1in" or "1" with double quotes and it will convert it into picas. I'm going to bring in some text from a text file. I'll click at the top of the margin area and it will fill out the width of the margin area starting where I clicked.
Why do some people like picas? That's because our typography is measured in points and picas relate to each other. There are 72 points in every inch and 6 picas in every inch. One pica is equal to 12 points. When writing picas, you say full picas and then leftover picas, such as "0p0". To indicate one full pica and zero leftover points, you would say "1p0".
If I add a point and then I add another point and keep doing that until I get to 11 points, I have one full pica and 11 leftover points. When I add one more point, I'd have an entire pica. So I'd say, "Oh, there's zero leftover pikas and now I have two full pikas." As an example, if I am sizing my pikas, I can see up here in my interface six p0 and then I can keep clicking to go bigger. When I get up to eleven, when I go one more, it goes to seven p0, seven full picas and zero leftover points.
Full pica is on the left and partial pica is on the right, so that's leftover points. We care about pikas because we can add fine-tuned, little increments. There are 72 points in every inch, so I'm adding fine-tuned little increments here. However, if I switched over to inches, I'd dramatically lose the fine-tuned nature of my type. Each little tick does not go up the same amount and I only have 16 increments, so they're going in 16 of an inch, not 72 of an inch. So the amounts of each little tick that I go in is much bigger and I don't have the fine-tune control that I have with pikas.
To switch to inches more quickly, you can go to the intersection of your rulers and right click or control click on that intersection and switch to inches.
We have to emphasize the intersection of the rulers because the top and the horizontal and vertical rulers can be different units of measurement. To switch the units, right click or control click on the intersection area and choose your unit of measurement. Both of the rulers will switch without having to go into the preferences window. To make something five inches wide, type in 5i or five double quote.
To separate the figures from the rest of the paragraphs, use space before and space after. You can also show hidden characters by going under Type and checking the box. These characters will show the return symbols, tabs, spaces, and the end of text. To center, right align, or bold a word, you must select the entire paragraph. To do paragraph options, just clicking anywhere in the paragraph is enough. To bold the whole line, highlight the whole line. Moving past pikas, tabs can be used to create columns. To do this, create the tab stop and then add the text.
So a tab says to jump to a point and a line on that point; it's all a tab really does. If you hit the tab key on your keyboard, it just jumps to the next tab marker. By default, tab markers are put in every half inch, but you can customize where those tab markers go. The biggest mistake people make is they start typing in extra tabs to line things up. Instead, you want one column of text, then a tab, and another column of text, another tab, and so on. To customize tab markers, select all the paragraphs, go to Type and open the Tabs panel. You can put the panel over top here, and don't worry about being precise; just eyeball it.
Now if you see the top of the text box when you open this up, click the magnet button and the magnet will magnetize itself to the box. When you put a marker somewhere, you have to choose the alignment for that position; for example, you can left align, center a line, right align, or align on a decimal or any other character.
The @ symbols are lining up so you can align on any character that you want. You just have to select your tab marker and then change the 'align on character'. Initially it's a decimal but you can change that. I'm going to do Command-Z or on Windows Control-Z a bunch of times to go back because I want to undo that. That was all just demonstration. To line these up, I'm going to drag off these additional ones because you can get rid of these tab markers by dragging them off and then it goes back to the default half inch ones. I'm going to get rid of all of them and in fact, if you want to get rid of all of them, you can go into the panel menu on the top far right and just clear all of them.
I want to put my cursor here, let's do a left tab and I want to go to my first column here, so I'm going to put that there. To the right of that, all the remaining tabs are the default half inch ones. This is the first one and it only has those default half inch ones to the right of that tab now. If I want to make sure that my columns are equal in width, I can choose this tab and because InDesign can look at the previous offset, it can do a repeat tab which will repeat that same distance over and over again.
If I move that more, it does not live repeat, but I can go back in and say "repeat again" and it will move those other tab markers to keep them equally spaced. You can also add a optional leader tab. A leader character will lead up to it, so if you type in a period for example, it will fill out that space using periods. You do have to go through each tab marker, click on that marker, and then type in your leader character.
When you're done, you can close the tab panel and go into preview mode to see what this looks like or hide the hidden characters in the type menu. Hopefully this has helped you master how tabs work and also explained why picas can be useful. You don't have to use picas but if you're working with a bunch of other people that do, it is really nice. Give them a shot if you're not used to picas; part of it is just getting over the initial oddity of not being used to them, but once you get used to them, you start to learn to appreciate them.
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