[The guest author for this post is our friend Nigel French, a graphic designer and trainer based in Brighton, UK. Visit www.nigelfrench.com to learn more!]

Have you ever encountered type with two type sizes—one of them in parentheses? What’s that about?

Watch this sample video from my new title on lynda.com, InDesign Typography, that demonstrates how these parentheses might appear in your type size field and how to make them go away.

As I showed in the video, the parenthetical type size is a result of the Adjust Scaling Percentage preference which, when turned on, displays the original point size of your type along with the new point size in parentheses. But only if you scale the whole text frame (Cmd/Ctrl-Shift and drag from one of the corners to scale the frame proportionally). Once the frame has been scaled in this way, if you then apply scaling to a selected range of text both the original and the new type size are displayed.

I’m sure there are times when this is useful, but—and I can’t think of any right now—those times are few. Mostly it’s just confusing. This cropped up more often in earlier versions of InDesign when you scaled a type object that was part of a group. These days you have to go out of your way to create the “problem,”  but, for that once-in-a-blue-moon occasion when you encounter it, here’s the solution:

Choose the text frame, then from the Control Panel menu (top right) choose Redefine Scaling as 100%. Now you just have one point size—the actual size of the type. So that the problem doesn’t reoccur make sure that in General Preferences you have Apply to Content checked in the Object Editing section.