Indesign Secrets

Nathan wrote:
We use a font that has a SC (small caps) version and in our Body copy (which is regular) we would like all the numbers to be SC. Is there a way to use nested styles to change all the numbers to a different font or different character style inside a paragraph?
Nested styles are […]

We’ve received two emails this week regarding leading — or, more specifically, InDesign apparently ignoring or changing the leading values of paragraphs.
For example, G. wrote:
…The problem arises when we copy and then paste a text frame into a new document — some of the text blocks (not all) change their leading. But this is the […]

O.G. wrote: You can move an anchored object vertically by clicking on it with the Selection tool and dragging it up or down, but nothing indicates by how many points it’s been moved from the baseline. Is that info shown somewhere? And is there a way to cancel the move later, i.e. to bring the object back to its original position on the baseline, without having to reimport it?

This problem has affected InDesign users for decades! (Well, maybe not that long.) Fortunately, you can see and adjust the value of an inline object’s vertical offset (how far up or down it’s been moved). You need to open Object > Anchored Objects > Options.

Here’s a text frame with an inline object…

Tom e-mailed this question:

In Quark one had access to the control bar with a keyboard shortcut (command-option-M). Is there a shortcut in InDesign to get into the first field of the control palette?

Yes, the one you’re looking for is Command-6 (Control-6 on Windows). That highlights the first field in the Control panel regardless of which mode it’s in. Use the Tab key to move the focus to the next field(s), Shift-Tab to move back.

Other ones I find useful for the Control panel:

E.R. wrote: After seeing your corner-only border segment, it reminded me of a problem that I hadn’t been able to solve: I want to make the right- and left-hand side of the text frame a square bracket so that anything I typed into it would elongate the brackets as I typed. Alas, I’ve never found a solution.

I banged on this problem for a bit, too, and was about to give up when Sander Pinkse from the Netherlands sent me the answer from out of the blue. Not only that, but he showed how to make a rounded-corner table (sort of), which many people have also requested!

Let’s do the brackets first…

Christopher wrote: Do you know how to sort data in a table? From time to time, we need to change around the data in our tables. I always end up manually re-alphabetizing. But I wish I could find a way to sort it like you can in Excel.

Pariah Burke wrote a really good article in the last issue of InDesign Magazine in which he talked about this very thing. I would encourage you to get that article and read it through. But the quick answer is: There’s really no good way to do this, but there are two mediocre ways…

Ellis H. wrote: What we need is a way to place a stroke on only the corner(s) of the graphic box.

When I read this, I immediately thought of our good friend Rufus Deuchler in Italy, who came up with the solution to corner-strokes a couple of years ago before he was nabbed by Adobe to be an evangelist. I was dumbfounded when he showed me this because it’s incredibly simple and yet achieves something that I didn’t realize was possible in InDesign…

John wrote: Has anyone see a way to add more stroke size presets in InDesign? I have a huge project that uses .75 pt and 1.5 pt strokes like a zillion times. I don’t want to use a style sheet, I want to get into the “guts” of ID and add the 1.5 preset.

Well, up until the last line, the answer would have been “use an object style.” After all, that’s just what object styles are for, and it sounds like it would be perfecct for you. I’m not sure why you don’t want to use an object style, but I’ll just go with it and tell you the secret:…

S.W. wrote: Is there a way to convert all instances of font/dingbat to outlines in a document? I was using the square shaped dingbat from Wingdings as placeholder for a Check Box in a form I was designing in InDesign. To my surprise the Acrobat form recognition function wouldn’t recognize boxes in the PDF I exported, unless I converted them to outlines. So is there a quick way to do this for the entire document?

Interesting problem! While you cannot convert a single character to outlines everywhere throughout a document, you can convert it once, then use Find/Change to replace it…

Nina wrote: I have grouped several objects together and then pasted them into a shape / frame. HELP! I do not seem to be able to release the objects from the frame.

Don’t panic, Nina. I know what you mean: After you use Paste Into, it seems like you cannot select those objects again (especially a group). But you can. You just need a trick or two. And you need to understand the difference between two terms: Content and Container. The Container is any frame that holds an image, another frame, or a group of frames. The Content is whatever is inside the frame.

Here are three ways to select Content (objects inside other objects)…