By: Michael Murphy
July 16 2006 • 5:06 PM
Episode 25: To Track or Not to Track (VIDEO)
If you’re only using tracking to control the look of your type at the paragraph level — like I will confess to doing in the past — you’re missing out on features that give you far greater control of your type and make for much better-looking paragraphs. This episode covers Justification, Hyphenation, Glyph Scaling, Optical Margin Alignment, and typographic color.
This episode is available in the standard 672 x 450 format and as an iPod-compatible file.
Little
mistake here that i wanted to bring up to your attention for people
who tried to download the file but the browser gave an error saying
it didn’t find the file… it’s because on the standard format…
the link has an extra 0 at the title so instead
of:?r?nhttp://www.theindesigner.com/podcasts/tid25_theindesigner_025.mp4?r?n?r?nyou
need to correct it
to:?r?nhttp://www.theindesigner.com/podcasts/tid25_theindesigner_25.mp4?r?n?r?nor
before you know it i’m sure that Mr. Murphy will modify the link
with the correct nameing :)?r?n?r?nThank you for the new podcast,
just waiting for it to ?r?n download now
Thanks, David! Good catch. I’m so
fried after finishing a podcast that I rush through the post and
don’t double-check my links. This has been fixed. There should be
no trouble for anyone downloading it now.
Great tutorial as usual, Michael! Should be
Well done!
required viewing for all InDesign users.?r?n?r?nKeep in mind that as
much as we try to set perfect word and letterspacing (and glyph
scaling … my defaults are set to the same as your custom settings),
InDesign can’t always honor them because of other factors. If you
turn on Highlight > H&J Violations in Preferences >
Composition, ID will apply three shades of yellow highlighting to
lines of type that violate your settings … the darker the yellow,
the more severe the violation.?r?n?r?nSo when I’m creating style
sheets for justified text, I’ll often fiddle with the H&J
settings to get the right balance of good-looking type with most
consisten application (fewest/least severe violations). I’m after
what you’re after, even color in the type.?r?n?r?nI don’t spend
*too* much time on it, though, because I’ve found that the only way
to make the yellow highlighting — the H&J violations —
completely disappear is to set tiny minimums and huge maximimum
numbers for all three settings in Justification. I mean, you could
set Glyph scaling at 50/100/200 and all the yellow disappears. But a
lot of the words in the paragraph will be different (apparent) font
sizes! (Glyph scaling is proportional horiz/vert).?r?n?r?nThat’s far
worse than subtle violations of the H&J settings, so I’m just
looking for settings that force the fewest “severe” violations …
I’m okay with a bunch of pale yellow.?r?n?r?nOne other tip along
these lines, that you already mentioned, is that the type of text
that you’re setting makes a significant difference. If your text is
filled with lots of capitalized words (and you’ve turned off
Hyphenate Capitalized Words), long words, etc., then you should use
that text as your “sample” text when setting your H&J
Preferences, instead of the default Placeholder text.?r?n?r?nYou can
make InDesign use any text for its “Fill With Placeholder Text”
command by saving it as a text-only document with the filename
“placeholder.txt” and putting that file in the InDesign application
folder.?r?n?r?nSorry for the long comment but your videocasts are so
deeply “InDesign geek” — a rare and wonderful thing — that it
triggers something in my reptilian InDesign brain.
Never apologize for a long post,
Anne-Marie (have you seen my posts on your blog?
Yikes!). And as in-depth as I try to get, you just can’t cover it
all. So your point about placeholder text is very welcome.?r?n?r?nI
usually use my “real” text as I’m creating paragraph settings (and,
ultimately, styles) so I can find all of those troublesome company
names, industry jargon, etc. that’s going to cause me to violate my
own rules.?r?n?r?nMy work approach is that, once I have a “good
enough” basis for my text, I make it a paragraph style, and whatever
adjustments I make as I go that I want applied overall, I just make
them on a small sample of the text and then use the Redefine Style
feature (Shift+Cmd+Opt+R or Shift+Ctrl+Alt+R) to cascade that change
to all of my other text.?r?n?r?nIn my experience, the people most
likely to sabotage my type with tracking (you know who you are,
editors!) don’t know enough about InDesign’s type settings to
“violate” it any other way. So that’s what I keep an eye on most.
But if there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, yes, H&J
violations could show up for more things than you could possibly care
to track.?r?n?r?nI love the “three shades of yellow” feature, too. It
reminds me of watching a weather report that’s tracking amounts of
rainfall on radar.?r?n?r?nGreat comments, Anne-Marie. Thanks!
Thank you Michael for
Nina
another great input. This episode realy made me rethink my standards
of dealing with type.?r?nI do see your point by using tiny values of
lettespace before tracking. I was taught (20 years ago) never to use
letterspace because you could not control it and that one could take
a look at american newspapers to see what a bad result letterspace
made… I have seen the point repeated later on in different danish
typesetting books. ?r?nA different approach for fine-tuning text
seems to exist in U.S. and in Scandinavia. I have seen no other
opinions pratcised than doing your tracking carefully is a matter of
course. - Until now I silently would have considered people doing
letterspace settings instead of tracking were amateurs
:-)?r?n?r?nWorth a discussion in our team - some “justified”-jobs
could really benefit from cautious letterspace implied in their
styles. (Glyph-scaling I find hard to accept except for unpretentious
work).?r?nThanks for making us think different
I’m not able to download the Ipod version of the Videocast. Is there a need to rename that as well … and if so to what?
Bernie — You’re absolutely right, and thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’m amazed no one’s said anything since the episode was created in July. But it’s up there now. The above link works to get you to the iPod version of this episode. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Hi Michael, just found your videos… is this really free? In response to your “To Track or Not to Track” video, I was wondering how letterspacing would effect any ligatures in the typeface… Thanks!
Scott –
Yes, it’s really free!
As to your question: If you’re using discretionary ligatures in OpenType fonts, they have a spacing “tolerance.” If you space the letterforms out too much, the ligature (”fi” for example) will break into its individual letterforms. If you track or tighten letterspacing too much, the same will happen. But there’s a reasonable range in which you can work that will keep discretionary ligatures looking the way you intend.