October 31 2006 • 6:34 PM
By:
Michael Murphy
The InDesigner Episode 31: White Space
No, this isn’t the white space you learned about in design school. Rather, this episode takes an in-depth look at all eight (yes, eight!) different types of white spaces available within InDesign. What are they, where are they, and how do you use them? Find out in this latest episode.
Also…get the inside scoop about the very first InDesigner contest to celebrate the upcoming one-year anniversary of the show.
Download it now or watch it in your browser:
The InDesigner – Episode 31 (42.8 MB, 15:14 minutes)
Who know white space was so interesting? I will be using that flush space footer trick!
I did not think it would be interesting for many people, so I sent is as a mail. But here it is, Mike, as requested:
Great episode, congratulations
There’s one thing you missed on non-breaking spaces though (although you probably don’t use it as often as we do in Poland). So here’s some non-breaking space trivia from Poland 
In Polish language we have a couple of single-letter words, like “i” (and), “z” (from), “w” (in) and so on. It is wrong to leave these words at the end of the line, so in professional typesetting we use all kinds of tricks to get rid of them. Programs written in Poland do it “out of the box”, but adopted software does not. Historically, we learned to use non-breaking space, putting it between the single-letter word and a next word (like “w^domu”). Worked for most software, but…
InDesign has the paragraph composer and when you have a justified text, you can vary the width of the ordinary space (setting the minimum, preferred and maximum values, you know that). Problem is, these settings do not affect non-breaking spaces, so even in tight lines that have spaces reduced to minimal value, non-breaking space is still at 100%. This does not look good. I am a beta tester of Adobe and I alarmed them about it a couple of times, but so far nothing changed. Maybe in CS3…
Meanwhile there’s a workaround that might come in handy for you too. Instead of using the fixed width non-breaking space, we give a “no break” attribute to the single-letter word, the space after it and the first letter of the following word (because we still want it to be hyphenated when necessary). You can do it either by hand, using find & replace function or using a specia macro or script (there’s a handful of them on the Polish market).
There, hope this knowledge comes in handy one day (when you’re assigned to typeset a Polish magazine
)).
And a suggestion. I will not be taking part in the competition (sending a shirt across the ocean might be a costy business), but I’d love to see an episode on advanced typography in InDesign (and how to put it in actual use) — ligatures, swash alternates, proportional digits and so on.
Fantastic info, Pawel! Thanks so much for posting this. Whether or not the one word issue is unique to the Polish language, the “no break” attribute trick is a great idea when trying to work around the spacing issue.
Michael, you wrote São Paulo wrong! It’s not with the letter “O”, but with “U”.
And now you know that you have people in Brazil that watch your podcast too! Keep up the good work!
I think this is the case, but wanted to check. Is the Figure Space the with of a lineing figure? And not an old style figure? I think so, but wanted to double check. I’m sure that there are some old style figures that would be the same size, but I think the purpose of the Figure Space is for setting up tabular text.
Marco (and all the people of Brazil) –
Please forgive my bad spelling. I’m especially embarrassed because that was deliberately put in as a nod to a friend from Brazil who I got to know through the podcast. Next time, I’ll check the dictionary first.
Jason –
In the example I used, those were only normal number characters. I had not assigned any special OpenType figure options. And yes, the general use for figure spaces is to set up tabular text. But with all the tab, table, and other formatting options in InDesign, I have yet to ever use it for that.
Sorry to say, but this episode doesn’t play in iTunes.
Gerald –
I think what you mean is that the episode doesn’t transfer to your iPod, since it plays in iTunes just fine.
There are some “technical difficulties” in making iPod-comptaible versions available at the moment due to the changes in iTunes and QuickTime since Apple began its new movie download service. The new spec for iPod-compatible video allows for the large-format (640×480) video to be transferred to an iPod, but does not allow any customization of the options. As a result, everything is in stereo (which is unnecessary) and uses quality settings that are inappropriately high for the podcast.
What happens then is that the iPod version becomes twice the size of the normal version when exported as a “.m4v” file. In the case of Episode 30, which was 50MB (give or take), the iPod version became 100MB.
I’m reluctant to post these bloated files for two reasons: (1) the end-user would be saddled with an unnecessarily large file, which is unfair to them, and (2) a file this size will end up exceeding bandwith limitations on my server, costing me money to distribute a free videocast, which is unfair to me.
Until the issue is resolved, here’s a workaround for you:
1. Download the normal version.
2. In iTunes 7 (you must be using that version for this to work, select the episode in your list of podcasts and, from the Advanced menu, select Convert Selection for iPod.
This will take some time to convert, depending on the length of the video, and you’ll see that the file will be more than 50% larger when the conversion is completed. But at least you’ll be able to transfer it to your iPod.
Hi Michael, thanks for your answer, but I was refering to iTunes mot my iPod. I’m currently reloading all episodes and will check what happens then. I’ll get back to you soon.
Gerald
I just want to say that what Pawel said does not only apply for Polish language, but for another Slavonic languages as well, for example Czech language, Slovak language and so on.
I’d like to ask you if there’s some easy way how to import and edit mathematical and physical equations. I need to do something with lot of these equations and yet didn’t find a good way how to do it. Is there any plugin for importing them from Microsoft Word?
Your another European listener,
Jirka
from Prague, Czech republic
Thanks for the international perspective, Jirka. I’m glad that both you and Pawel are speaking up for these specific issues, which do not crop up in our domestic experience.
The only math equation plug-in for InDesign I’m familiar with (meaning that I saw a demo of it at the Chicago InDesign Conference earlier this year) is InMath from the German-based i.t.i.p.
The URL for the product is http://www.itip.biz/products/inmath/inmath.html
There is one additional form of whitespace possible in InDesign. It is in an XML element.
You can choose to ignore it.
The footer trick is great. Thank you for telling about it. Now I found out, that it can be accomplished a little bit easier. Just use a non-breaking-space for example in city names consisting of two parts (“new york”) and standard spaces between the town names. The result is just the same as if using flush spaces between all elements of the footer.
There’s another kind of white space character that has been creating some interest in the U2U forum recently, the so-called zero-width-space. Its unicode is U+200B. InDesign doesn’t support this as a UI-accessible element except through Find/Change. You can find instances or insert instances by using [200B] in either box (except those need to be angled-brackets, but you can’t type them here).
This “space” literally takes no space at all. Kerning/tracking sees right through it, so text is not disturbed by inserting the characters. The dynamic spelling checker has a hissy fit if you deploy a lot of these characters because it is suddenly presented with a slew of single-letter words it doesn’t recognize, but otherwise the character appears to be benign.
Why would you use it? To control where a URL should break without having to worry about a reflow introducing ugly spaces into your URLs.
I’ve not done enough work with this to be certain that it is completely benign in all situations, so use with care, but it looks as though the character can be deployed as an “optional line break” character for those situations where very long words won’t fit in a column but you don’t want a hyphen.
Dave
Michael,
sorry for the delay. After reloading the episode is working. Thanks for you effords.
Gerald
Great topic Michael! I wanted to especially compliment you on the technical side of your podcast. With most video tutorials the host cannot keep their mouse still – they move the mouse around constantly! I love how you have created your podcasts and the audio sounds great. Thanks for your time!
Thanks, Shawn. A lot of effort goes into avoiding visual confusion in the podcast. Glad you noticed.
I thank you very much for the work you do in these video tutorials. I will continue to watch and study each episode. I happen to believe that this is a great example of the future of learning.
Dave Saunders’s comment about the zero-width space is very helpful. Thanks a lot.