Comments on: The InDesigner Episode 31: White Space

By: BT

BT — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:45:49 +0000

Dave Saunders’s comment about the zero-width space is very helpful. Thanks a lot.

By: Russell Spears

Russell Spears — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:58:13 +0000

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.

By: Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:34:37 +0000

Thanks, Shawn. A lot of effort goes into avoiding visual confusion in the podcast. Glad you noticed.

By: Shawn Young

Shawn Young — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 20:58:32 +0000

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!

By: Gerald

Gerald — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 13:39:03 +0000

Michael,

sorry for the delay. After reloading the episode is working. Thanks for you effords.

Gerald

By: Dave Saunders

Dave Saunders — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 12:05:36 +0000

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

By: Andreas Reiser

Andreas Reiser — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:54:34 +0000

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.

By: Herrmueller

Herrmueller — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:48:02 +0000

There is one additional form of whitespace possible in InDesign. It is in an XML element.
You can choose to ignore it.

By: Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:02:21 +0000

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

By: Jirka

Jirka — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 09:45:50 +0000

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