So the first thing we will do is go up to the general option on the upper left hand side, just a couple of things we might want to change in here. I am not go through every single one of this because they are many, but most of them are set for a specific reason, but I have found and working through inDesign for the last six years or so, but there are some in here, which could do with being set a little differently every time we start working with a new file.
The first one is whether you decide to have tool tips on or not. As in we are learning InDesign as we go along here. It is probably worth having those specified to normal as you feel more comfortable with the program, you go ahead and set them to none.
Another option, which is useful for people coming in across from both PageMaker and QuarkXPress is a floating tools palette option. Now, the tools palette in the upper left hand side of the screen is currently set to two columns. You have options under there to change it to a single column, which will just make it one tool wide and make the palette a lot deeper to incorporate all of the tools or even a single row, which will actually make it go all the way across the top of the screen in one long wide tool bar that actually sits underneath the control palette. So depending on how you want to customize your work space. The single row option is actually quite handy sometimes, but for now we will just keep it set to the standard double column.
Now, the next option down is the type option. Go ahead and select that and really there is only one thing I want to specify in here at this point and that is the option here that says apply leading to entire paragraphs. When people are working inside of InDesign sometimes they may select just a line or a word of type and adjust the leading and it will only apply to that individual line or that individual word. That can happen and if you are making star sheets from that, it can get a bit messy because InDesign we will actually see different values of leading as it selects the type. So just to be on the safe side, make sure that you apply leading to the entire paragraphs when we worked with our leading settings.
Now, there is a new option here, InDesign CS2 incorporates a font preview so when we pull the fonts down from the menu, very similar to the way illustrator works, we can actually see a preview of what that type phase looks like. We can go ahead and choose a small, medium or large preview for that or leave a set to medium now, but maybe as we go on we might decide to drop that down to small.
Now, another new feature of InDesign CS2 is to drag and drop text editing. Something that has been missing for quite some time and in fact it is much more flexible than you imagine. We will leave that turned off for now because we are going to have a lesson specifically using that later on in the training series. So we will just leave that disabled for a second.
If we go back up to the upper left-hand side, the advanced type option shows a setting, it is very similar to what people might be used to from QuarkXPress, whereas if we were to use a superscript, subscript or small capital default characters, these are the ones that just preset inside of InDesign. These are the values to which it would scale and move those particular characters.
If you have ever tried to do a fraction with a type phase that does not actually contain a fraction. Superscripts and subscripts is normally the way you would achieve it. Superscripts make the letter smaller, moves it up above the baseline. Subscripts will make it smaller and make sure their lines on the bottom of the baseline.
The trouble with this is the characters are not looking to thin compared to the rest of the type around them. One thing we are going to do inside the series is we are going to use an open type font, which actually comes installed within InDesign CS and all of this superscripts-subscripts settings will actually become irrelevant because we will be using true superscripts, subscripts and small capital characters. So, to just to point out that there if you actually need it, but we are going to be using open type characters to get around this problem.
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