Adjusting Word Spacing in InDesign

David Blatner

9

Robbie S wrote:

Here’s a problem for you: I know there are keyboard commands for closing and opening word spaces. The closing up works fine, but on some Macs the “add word space” doesn’t work!

Adobe doesn’t talk much about the shortcuts for adding and removing word spacing, but any proud owner of our Keyboard Shortcut Poster will know about them: Command-Option-Delete/Ctrl-Alt-Backspace closes word spacing by 20 units (you have to have more than one word selected for this to work, of course), and Command-Option-\ (backslash) or Ctrl-Alt-\ opens word spacing by the same amount. Add the Shift key and you get 5x that amount (100 units each direction).

Note that these keyboard shortcuts are actually just “macros” that select all the space characters in the selected text and change their kerning. You can select a space character after using the shortcut to confirm this.

However, Robbie is correct: The Command-Option-\ often doesn’t work on people’s Mac OS X machines because something else on the Mac is grabbing that shortcut. It may be the Smooth Text feature I’ve read about in OS 10.4.8, though it doesn’t appear to have any effect on my machine. Whatever it is, it grabs it before InDesign notices you’ve typed anything. The only good solution I’ve found is to add another shortcut to this feature:

1. Choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts
2. Choose Text and Tables from the Product Area popup menu
3. Find “Increase Word Space”
4. Type a new shortcut of your choice in the New Shortcut field
5. Click Assign and then click OK

Now you should be able to use your new shortcut for increasing word spacing.

Here’s one other way to adjust word spacing for an entire paragraph: Place the cursor in the paragraph and choose Justification from the flyout menu in either the Paragraph palette or the Control palette in paragraph mode. (Or just press Command-Option-Shift-J/Ctrl-Alt-Shift-J.) Now change the Desired setting for Word Spacing. If you want to radically increase it (say, to 200%), you’ll also need to increase the Maximum word spacing value. Even better, set this up in the Justification panel of a paragraph styles definition!