Comments on: Creating Percentage-based Styles

By: Rudi Warttmann

Rudi Warttmann — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:13:53 +0000

Good idea – as long as you accept that all enlargements (reducements) are calculated electronically (and not by different dedicated fonts in the appropriate font sizes).

However, this is the way layout software today goes.

Another thing that I really miss is the ability to reduce the point size of a particular font by an absolute value! Consider a character style “minus 1.5 pt” – regardless of what the actual point size is.

Rudi

By: James Fritz

James Fritz — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:02:18 +0000

@Anne-Marie – The em percentages in web design was part of my inspiration for this post.

By: Quentin Devlay

Quentin Devlay — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:40:44 +0000

Speaking of percentage-based styles, I do hope they’ll integrate this into object styles as well – I’d dearly love to be able to define things like stroke width or drop-shadow offset as a percentage instead of having to tweak them manually each time I scale an object.

Let’s pray CS43 does it. :-p

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:30:37 +0000

This reminds me of how you spec type for web sites via CSS, as percentages of an em. Interesting!

By: Jongware

Jongware — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:28:38 +0000

Tim,

You are correct, it does (or “it doesn’t”) — anyway, Auto-leading uses the original font size and does not take scaling into account.

Quentin:

Character styles take precedence and replace what’s in the paragraph style, as always. One would think (I just did) it would take a percentage of the percentage, but that doesn’t work for anything else. Color, to name something else, is not mixed but replaced; Bold text plus an italic character style does not yield Bold Italic text.

By: Tim Osmond

Tim Osmond — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:58:53 +0000

With regard to autoleading – doesn’t that take its starting measure as the size of the text regardless of what horizontal/vertical scaling is applied?

So 10pt text on 120% autoleading will be given 12pt leading (10/12), but if 80% horizontal/vertical scaling is used the leading remains at 12pt, though you might have expected the result to be 8/9.6

By: Quentin Devlay

Quentin Devlay — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:59:17 +0000

One question – in the case of character styles used in nested styles, which scaling option takes precedence? The one defined in the character style or the one in the paragraph style?

By: Fred Goldman

Fred Goldman — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:54:20 +0000

This is a great idea. I do it all the time with character styles, doing it with paragraph styles can be a little confusing (especially if you have character styles that also use scaling!).

Actually, leading can be scaled if you use Autolead. You set its percentage in the Justification panel of the paragraph styles dialog.