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Expos­ing a Hid­den Fea­ture of InDes­ign 2.0

Does this describe you: Type is your thing. Ensur­ing that the baselines are con­sist­ent is caus­ing a rela­tion­ship break­down between you and your part­ner, dog or man­ager. You wake up in a cold sweat think­ing about bad hyphen­a­tion decisions you made dur­ing the day.

If so, its time to look at this little hid­den fea­ture of InDes­ign 2.0. It’s not as friv­il­ous as zoom­ing, zap­ping ali­ens — but it may change your life. At least a little.

Here’s the prob­lem: you have two flows of text on a page; one mas­ter column con­tains the body copy; and there is also a second column that con­tains a pull quote, or mar­gin notes that refer to the main body text.

To type­set the text to ensure read­ab­il­ity, the appro­pri­ate pro­cess is to align the baseline of the first lines of each para­graph, with the main body para­graph flow­ing on the document-wide baseline; and the mar­gin note start­ing on the same baseline, but the lead­ing flow­ing appro­pri­ate to its smal­ler type size.

Set­ting this type manu­ally is a chore. You have to exactly align the baselines of the two text frames. If the text reflows, or the mar­gin quote needs to move — there is many minutes (to hours) of rework to realign your text.

InDes­ign 2.0 has what Tim Cole (Adobe’s InDes­ign Evan­gel­ist) calls a double-secret fea­ture. Its a little hid­den, but worth the effort to uncover to solve this prob­lem and hope­fully save the rela­tion­ship with your pet.

Firstly, we need to ensure that the doc­u­ment has a baseline grid set. To do this, go to Edit>Preferences>Grids. The grouped area “Baseline Grid” con­tains the set­tings. Start is the start­ing pos­i­tion from the top of the doc­u­ment, Incre­ment Every is the baseline setting.

Set the baseline to the appro­pri­ate baseline grid for your document.

And assign to a para­graph by using the Type>Paragraph palette. The “Align to Baseline Grid” but­ton is in palette as shown.

I have also turned on View>Show Baseline Grid to see where the baselines are… it helps visu­al­ise what is going on in our document.

The second para­graph in this instance lies to the right of the body para­graph. Its Char­ac­ter set­tings are com­pletely dif­fer­ent: dif­fer­ent point size, leading.

If you have not cre­ated a cus­tom key­board short­cut set, Click on the “New Set” but­ton.

Now it is time to sneak up on the double secret fea­ture. It is hid­den in the Edit>Keyboard Short­cuts, spe­cific­ally in the Text and Tables sec­tion. Scroll down until you see “Only Align First line to Grid” You will see that there is no key­board short­cut assigned to this option.

We also need to assign a key­board short­cut to this option. Click in the New Short­cut area, and type a new Short­cut. Press the keys for your new key­board short­cut. If the key sequence is cur­rently being used for another com­mand, InDes­ign dis­plays that com­mand under Cur­rent Shortcuts.

The con­text here is import­ant. The con­text ensures that the short­cut per­forms the way you inten­ded. For example, you can assign Ctrl+G to group two cells together (Table con­text) and Ctrl+G to insert spe­cial char­ac­ters (Text context).

To enable this fea­ture, assign it to a key­board shortcut.

Now, back in our ori­ginal doc­u­ment, we have a right hand “hanging” para­graph. The first step is to set it to the document’s baseline grid. Of course, all of the lines are now aligned to the document’s baseline. We’re one step on the way.

Now we use the key­board short­cut. In my key­board set, they were assigned using the “Default” con­text. This means I have to select the text frame using the black arrow (Selec­tion Tool) and type the new short­cut. Voila!

Please note as I move the right hand para­graph down the page, the baseline for the first line stays aligned to the baseline grid whilst the fol­low­ing lines fol­low the lead­ing for the paragraph.

Note that the you doesn’t have to use the key­board short­cut on each para­graph. Though there is no UI in the palettes for this fea­ture, it can be saved/captured as part of a para­graph style…the cre­ate and redefine func­tions both ‘see’ this attrib­ute on a para­graph level.

The Edit>Keyboard Short­cuts is worth ser­i­ous invest­ig­a­tion. Next time you wake in a cold sweat, just jump onto your InDes­ign and have a look. Hope­fully it will not send you back to sleep…

Thanks to: Tim Cole, Sandee Cohen.