Comments on: Field Guide to Composition Highlighting

By: Rick Gordon

Rick Gordon — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:40:22 +0000

I would find Custom Tracking/Kerning highlighting much more useful if you could set it so that any tracking or kerning that is consistent with the applied paragraph style or applied character style would NOT be highlighted. I don’t want to see default renderings of a style highlighted. If I have a small caps running head style defined with a +20 tracking setting, I want to know when it’s NOT +20 — if it’s zero, perhaps. It’s the wrong behavior in my opinion.

By: margiej11

margiej11 — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:42:58 +0000

thanks so much for ALWAYS having the answers to my indesign questions! now my “pink highlighting” is gone!
i wish indesign had an overall “alert window” available for when you know something is awry, but you just don’t know what!

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:12:48 +0000

Good point, Dave! Maybe they should add another highlighting just for missing glyphs. I get those all all the time with the whole Zapf Dingbats morass.

By: Mariella

Mariella — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:16:24 +0000

Thanks for this article! I’m using the highlighting feature for Custom Tracking/Kerning in a project right now. It is very useful, but I didn’t know about it until I read this!

By: Dave Saunders

Dave Saunders — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:07:45 +0000

Nice summary, A-M, but your coverage of the “dreaded pinking” misses an important point (BTW: I always called it the “dreaded pinkness” but you’re right: “pinking” is more accurate.):

The more insidious meaning for the dreaded pinking is: missing glyph. When a font is missing, at least you can use Find Font to find the pinking and deal with it. But when a glyph is missing from a font you do have installed — something that used to plague Mac users more than Windows user until Microsoft joined Apple in issuing new versions of their fonts with the same name as less-endowed predecessors — in this situation, the only way to find the missing glyph is to notice the pinkness on screen or the box or missing glyph on the printed proof.

This is something that you can’t script around either. The only way I can think of to detect a missing glyph by script is to attempt to temporarily convert every character in a document to outlines — those that fail don’t have an outline, i.e., they’re missing glyphs. But the time taken for such a script to run would be horrendous.

Another way that missing glyphs can happen is if you change a paragraph style from one font to another. For example, some OpenType fonts have a wider array of fractions built into them than others. Or, you’re importing a Word document and making a font change on the fly during the import.

You’ll get no warning from InDesign when this happens other than the dreaded pinking. In my opinion, it’s fine to switch off all the other highlights, but this one absolutely should be on all the time.

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:18:20 +0000

Post 16 from Gerald Singelmann or post 17 as zip-file

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:17:22 +0000

In this content there is the “highlight-on-off.jsx” script to mention.
Discussed here: http://indesignsecrets.com/compositing-skills.php
I work a lot with this script and really like it!

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:43:18 +0000

Thanks for this thorough overview of these much-neglected but greatly-useful features, Anne-Marie!

I have long used the H&J Violations a lot, but now I shall resolve to begin using the Custom Tracking/Kerning more, also.