Adobe InDesign is a type-lover’s friend—but sometimes the nature of the affection is not so obvious. With each new release and update, Adobe has added more typographic features and enhanced existing ones. The problem is, unless you know where to look, many of these typographic niceties can go unnoticed.

You may have poked around InDesign enough to have spotted some of them, and maybe you’ve wondered about the rest. But like most busy professionals, you probably haven’t been able to take the time to explore them fully. That’s the reason for the following list. It includes some of the most powerful, useful—and yet often invisible and misunderstood—typographic features of InDesign CS3.

1. OPTICAL MARGIN ALIGNMENT
One of the handiest overlooked features of InDesign is Optical Margin Alignment (see figure 1). It’s located in the oddly named Story palette. When this feature is activated, it not only hangs punctuation into the margin to eliminate visual holes—creating a more uniform vertical alignment—but also pulls lines beginning with serifed characters and certain overhanging characters (such as T, Y and A) into the margin.

Note that the point size determines how far into the margin characters will extend, but it doesn’t necessarily have to corre­spond to the point size of your text. Start by setting it to the point size of your type (it defaults to 12 point), then adjust the setting to what looks good to you—which may at times be considerably larger than the text size.

This feature automatically creates polished and professional-looking typography, and is useful for left- and right-aligned type, as well as justified text.

To set Optical Margin Alignment:
Select the text box, or place the cursor within the text.
Under Type in the main menu, select Story.
Check Optical Margin Alignment.
Adjust the point size as necessary to get the results you want.

2. PARAGRAPH COMPOSER
Have you tried to make manual line breaks in text only to have other line breaks mysteriously change somewhere else in the para­graph? Adobe Paragraph Composer (fig. 2) is probably the culprit.

When setting text, InDesign has two options for handling line breaks: Adobe Paragraph Composer and Adobe Single-line Com­poser. The Paragraph Composer, turned on by default, attempts to minimize unattractive hyphenations and rags by evaluating all lines in a paragraph and making breaks accordingly. It can greatly improve breaks and alignment, especially in justified text. But if you prefer manual line breaks, you’ll find it re-evaluates the entire paragraph and sometimes makes other breaks without permission.

For this reason, if you plan on making manual line breaks, you might want to switch to the Single-line Composer for that para­graph or text box, or even for an entire document. You can achieve this by selecting all the text boxes and changing them all at once, or by switching to Single-line Composer before you open a new document. This leaves you in charge—and prevents the applica­tion from doing too much thinking for you.

Paragraph and Single-line Composer can be accessed two ways:
Go to Type > Paragraph palette > Paragraph menu.
Select Adobe Paragraph Composer (the default) or Adobe Single-line Composer.

Or:
Go to Window > Control > Paragraph menu.
Select Adobe Paragraph Composer (default) or Adobe Single-line Composer.

3 & 4. KERNING: METRICS VS. OPTICAL
InDesign offers two options for adjusting automatic kerning, both located in the Character palette and the Control palette.

The Metrics setting (fig. 3) uses a font’s built-in kerning pairs. This is the default setting and is usually best when the font has good kern-pair tables. The Optical (fig. 4) setting lets InDesign determine the spacing and kerning between all character pairs. This can be useful when a font has few or no built-in kern pairs. It is also helpful when overall spacing feels uneven. This is par­ticularly handy for lengthy copy where manual kerning can be impractical, tedious and time-consuming. Optical kerning is also beneficial when combining different fonts, weights or type sizes where no kern pairs exist in the Metrics setting.

Remember, no matter which setting you use, you can always add manual kerns in addition to the software-selected kerning.

5. IMPORTING TEXT
Still using copy and paste to bring text into a document? If so, you’re missing out on a helpful typographic feature of InDesign—the option to convert all foot and inch marks used for quotation marks and apostrophes in imported text to smart (typographer’s) quotes (fig. 5). This comes in very handy if, like many designers, you get copy from writers who don’t use smart quotes.

You may need to review and convert back inch and foot marks, which will be converted to smart quotes along with the rest. Don’t forget to check contractions such as rock ’n’ roll or the ’80s, which call for single closed quotes and not the single open quotes that normally appear before a word, number or character.

To import text:
Go to File > Place and select Show Import Options.
Select Use Typographer’s Quotes and begin your import.

6. BREAK LINKING TEXT BOXES
Have you ever wanted to unlink text boxes without losing or dis­turbing their contents? You can, and it takes just seconds (fig. 6).

Here’s how:
Open your Scripts menu (Window > Automation > Scripts).
Look in the Application folder > Samples > and then the Java Script folder.
Select the text boxes to be unlinked, click on SplitStory.jsx, and voilà!

This “hidden” yet extremely useful script can make your life easier when you’re done laying out and/or paginating text, but want to adjust the copy without disturbing all the other columns and pages.

7. LIGATURES & TRACKING
One feature of an OpenType font is the ability to accommodate virtually unlimited ligatures (both standard and discretion­ary varieties). When accessing ligatures via the Character and/or OpenType palette, their presence can be affected in this way: Tracking over 20 units and -60 or less (fig. 7) will result in liga­tures converting back to individual glyphs. This happens automatically to prevent uneven, unsightly letter spacing from combining extreme tracking with fixed-spaced ligatures.

CHANGING DEFAULTS
Many of the above features can be turned on or off for all future documents by changing your default settings. To do this, make sure all documents are closed. Launch InDesign and change settings and options as desired. The next step is the important one: Quit InDesign to commit the new settings to memory—then relaunch the application. Your new defaults will apply to all new documents you create.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
Want to increase your productivity in a matter of seconds? One of the easiest ways is to use keyboard shortcuts for common actions such as changing font size, kerning, tracking and even baseline shift. Here are a few type-specific keyboard shortcuts.

MAC
Adjust Font Size
Increase by Increment: Cmd + Shift + >
Decrease by Increment: Cmd + Shift + <
(add Option to the above keystrokes to make them Increment x 5)
Adjust Kerning/Tracking
Increase by Increment: Option + right arrow
Decrease by Increment: Option + left arrow
Increase by Increment x 5: Cmd + Option + right arrow
Decrease by Increment x 5: Cmd + Option + left arrow
Adjust Baseline Shift
Move Up by Increment: Option + Shift + up arrow
Move Down by Increment: Option + Shift + down arrow

PC
Adjust Font Size
Increase by Increment: Ctrl + Shift + >
Decrease by Increment: Ctrl + Shift + <
(add Alt to the above keystrokes to make them Increment x 5)
Adjust Kerning/Tracking
Increase by Increment Alt + right arrow
Decrease by Increment Alt + left arrow
Increase by Increment x 5 Ctrl + Alt + right arrow
Decrease by Increment x 5 Ctrl + Alt + left arrow
Increase between words Ctrl + Alt + Shift + \
Decrease between words Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Backspace
Clear all manual kerning and reset tracking to 0 Ctrl + Alt + Q

Adjust Baseline Shift
Move Up by Increment: Alt + Shift + up arrow
Move Down by Increment: Alt + Shift + down arrow

KEYBOARD INCREMENTS
You might already use keyboard shortcuts, but did you know the default increments for type size and leading, baseline shift and kerning can be changed? I recommend changing them to .5, .5 and 5/1000 … or whatever values are best for your needs.

Here’s how: Under InDesign in the main menu, go to Preferences > Unit & Increments under Keyboard Increments.