View More Font Styles in Story/Galley View
|
I just received an e-mail from an InCopy user (an ME for a publication in Iowa) asking a common question:
“We’re using fonts that don’t have their own built-in bold, italic, bold-ital. We’re using Franklin Gothic Demi for boldface. In Story view, this font doesn’t display as bold – which is very annoying to writers. Any ideas on how this problem could be solved?”
I certainly do. As the ME found out, the editing typeface you choose from the Galley and Story Appearance toolbar (at the lower left of the window) is limited to showing Plain (aka Regular, or Book), Bold, Italic and Bold Italic variations of any and all typefaces that text is actually formatted with in the document, as seen in Layout View.
So if the text is formatted with a Demi (equivalent to a “Medium” or “Semibold”) font style, InCopy has to make a decision: Should it show up in Galley/Story as Plain or as Bold? It always opts for Plain. It has to make similar mapping decisions for styles like Condensed, Heavy and Black.
Clever InCopy users will think, “A-ha! I’ll just choose the same font used for the text as my Galley/Story view display face!” But alas, it’s fruitless. For some reason, InCopy refuses to display any style in a Galley/Story Display font other than the usual regular, B, I and BI of the one you chose. Franklin Gothic Regular and Demi look the same: Regular. Only text formatted with Franklin Gothic Heavy will show up as Bold. You have to switch to Layout view to see that Demi is bolder than Regular, and Heavy bolder than Demi.
It’s a real pain when you’re using a non-standard style like Demi for, say, bold lead-ins to plain body text. You can’t tell in Galley/Story view where the bold lead-in ends, or even if it’s there in the first place, at least not by eyeballing it. (You can always select text and get an accurate readout of its formatting by looking in the Character or Character Styles panels.)
The Fix
InCopy users, the solution lies in a secret “extra” typeface you can specify for Galley/Story:
- Make sure that your Galley/Story Display font — the one you choose from the toolbar — is set to a different typeface than the one you’re trying to see the different weights of. In other words, leave it at the default Letter Gothic typeface or whichever you prefer. Of course, the one you choose here should come with the usual Bold, Italic and Bold Italic style variations — if you choose one that doesn’t, InCopy alerts you.
- Open the InCopy Preferences dialog box (from the Edit menu on Windows or the InCopy menu on Macs) and go to the “Galley and Story Display” section.
- Click the checkbox next to “Override Preview Font” to turn it on, and from the dropdown menu of installed fonts choose the typeface that has all the variations you need to see. (In the ME’s situation, he should choose ITC Franklin Gothic from this menu. If your story is set in Myriad Pro, choose that one, if it’s using different weights of Futura, choose that, and so on.)
- Click OK in Preferences and look at the text in Galley/Story. Hallelujah! Demi looks darker than Regular and lighter than Heavy!
It turns out that in addition to your single chosen display font, you can have InCopy show one other font in Galley/Story. It will only display that font if text is actually formatted with it; and if so, it displays ALL the style variations as needed.
You can change the “extra” font on the fly — perhaps another story in your document uses a different chock full ‘o styles typeface — just by going back to Preferences: Galley and Story Display and selecting a different font.
Woo-hoo!
 |