Hi, I'm David Blatner from InDesign Secrets.com
and I'm going to answer a common question
that we hear from new InDesign users. "How do I make
some text bold? Or italic?"
For example, here I'll grab the Type tool inside
my Tools panel. And then I'll come over here and select some text.
I'll just drag over it.
Now, to make it bold, I might try and press
the universal keyboard shortcut for "make it bold,"
and that's Command-B or Control-B on
Windows. But that doesn't make it bold here.
Instead, up comes the Text Frame Options
dialog box. Now, this dialog box lets you
control all kinds of things about the
text inside your text frame. But it does not help you
make text bold. So, I'm going to cancel that
by clicking the Cancel button. Instead,
there are three ways to make text bold in InDesign.
The first way is to press Command-Shift-B
or on Windows it's Control-Shift-B.
Adding the Shift key makes it work.
But, there's kind of a problem here. A lot of
fonts are in families that have more than one kind of bold.
For example, this font might have
semi-bold. Or heavy. So fortunately,
there's another way to make text bold. A way
that is a bit slower than just pressing a shortcut, but
it gives you more control. That's up here in
the Control panel. Now, right now my Control panel
is set to paragraph formatting. But if I come over here
to the far left edge and press the A button
now I have character formatting.
And over here, inside the second pop-up menu
that's the font style pop-up menu. You
can see all the different font styles for this family.
For example, this text has the bold style
applied to it. But if I want I could change this to
semi-bold, or medium, or some other style.
So, those are two different methods of
making text bold, or in this case medium.
But if you want to be a power user…if you want to do it the way
the professionals do it, then you'll make a character
style. It's really easy. Let me show you.
First, I'll go to the Window menu, choose Styles,
and then choose Character Styles.
That opens the Character Styles panel. And now from
this little menu in the upper-right corner of the panel,
I'll choose New Character Style.
Now, I'll give it a name. I'm going to call it "my bold."
But you can call it anything you want. Then I'll come over
here and click on Basic Character Formats. And now,
down here in the Font Style menu I'll
choose the style that I want.
You can see there's a lot of different styles in here.
The one I want is just "Bold." So I'll just type
"b-o-l" and it guesses I want Bold.
Finally, I'm going to turn off the Add to
CC Library checkbox. Because I just don't need that
here. Then, I'll click OK and you can see
that "my bold" shows up inside the Character Styles panel.
Now whenever I need some text to be bold, all I have to do is
click "my bold" and there we go.
I'll select some other text over here and try it again.
Making a character style does take more work but
it ends up being much better in the long-run if
you ever need to change the formatting quickly or if
you're going to export your document in a digital format, such as
ePUB or HTML.
Okay that's it for this episode of InDesign Secrets.
I hope you found this tip helpful.
If you did, be sure to check out
InDesignSecrets.com for thousands of InDesign articles and tutorials.
Or, go ahead and subscribe to our monthly publication, "InDesign Magazine."
So for now, this is David Blatner signing off
for InDesign Secrets.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét