InDesign Typography video excerpt: Scaling Text Frames
[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.
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Nowdays, it will happen whenever the page size is changed and a Scale liquid layout rule is used.
thank you !!! this was very helpful. i was not sure how that happened but it was making me crazy :-)
best
deb
The purpose of the preference setting, Adjust Scaling Percentage, is so that when you scale any object or group (including text), the final scale will be displayed, rather than showing 100%. It can be a useful thing in many cases, though when applied to a text frame it creates the confusing and much unloved “parentheses” effect.
Redefine Scaling to 100% will reset ANY objects or groups to 100%. However, if you apply this to a group, it will only reset the group to 100%, not the separate objects within the group. They (including any text) will still show the scaled percentages … and parentheses. That’s why you have to un-group the text frame from any other objects.
I was so confused while making the font size correct in my file. Then thanks to google and your post……….