InDesignSecrets Podcast 073
March 21st, 2008Written by Anne-Marie
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-073.mp3 (14.2 MB, 31:05 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)
- News: Lynda.com, Conferences, CreativePro.com, DesignGeek, ID User Groups
- Making a swatch overprint where ever it’s used (full post)
- When CMYK - Preserve Numbers won’t, and how to fix it (full post)
- Em dashes vs. En dashes vs. Hyphens
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: The Measure Tool
Links mentioned in the Podcast:
David’s InDesign: Beyond the Basics at Lynda.com
Free week’s trial of lynda.com
ID Conferences in Miami, Toronto CA
Check MogoEvents for news on the Auckland NZ ID Conf. (June) and the Seattle ID Master Class Conf. (November)
HerGeekness Says column at creativepro.com
Anne-Marie’s free DesignGeek e-zine
InDesign User Groups
Ah, a nice Studio Show again! Thanks, I enjoyed it all (even though I had read most of it online.) As for Europe and n-dashes, here in Norway it’s considered Good Typographic Form to use n-dashes — for phrases like this — and Bad Typographic Form to use m-dashes. But we do use m-dashes to initiate dialogue in books, instead of quote marks:
— I prefer m-dashes, he said firmly.
— But n-dashes are so cuddly and cute, she demurred.
It can be argued that that’s a lot simpler and cleaner than the English obsession with opening and ending quote marks.
And that concludes today’s report from the wacky world of typographic conventions.
One thing that annoys me about hyphens and en-dashes is that the font used by Adobe for its Find/Change dialog has a wider hyphen than en-dash. Granted, you can use ^= for en-dash, but why not type it? It’s so easy on a Mac keyboard at least.
Dave
Dave, I constantly get text that is set in Word and Word users don’t use hyphens, en- & em dashes correctly. Sometimes it’s a hyphen- not correctly spaced, or an em dash where a hyphen should be.
One of the first searches I do when importing a word file is to find ” - ” and change it to ” ^= “.
Dave, that is funny (and sad). I don’t think I ever noticed that about ID’s Find/Change dialog box before. Too bad we can’t set the default font for dialog boxes and panels (such as find/change), like we can for Story Editor.
I don’t know how to break this to you, Eugene, but there are plenty of InDesign users that don’t use hypens, em-dashes, and en-dashes properly, either.
Thanks, Bob, but I realise late on that Dave wasn’t talking about in general, sigh. Yes it’s a tough distinction. Honestly, I call over the proofreader for every comma and semi colon that I come across, can’t remember when and why to use one or the other. Funny enough, I remember the dashes just dandy.
Great show! I had never tried the measure tool before. I feel like a kid in a candy store!
I was multi tasking during the podcast by reading AM’s article at CreativePro…great AM! I work for a bunch of people who don’t understand descriptions at all but do understand what they see (sort of) I’ll have to give Connect or Brio a try.
Thanks a bunch. You two are great!
Thanks for the great podcast again. I’m looking forward to using the measure tool. I have been drawing marquees to measure distance, but frustrated about diagonals. Working for a textbook publisher, I have also had to measure angles in maths books. I’ve previously done it by drawing a line and then tilting it by a certain amount to find out the angle degree.
Thanks, guys!
Typographically, if you are going to use an em-dash, then there really shouldn’t be any space before or after the dash (you will probably need to kern).
However, really the em-dash shouldn’t be used (even in the USA).
The correct way to set off text is space, en-dash, space.
All typography books that I’ve seen (from the USA) all prescribe the use of sp, en-dash, sp.