Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Bible

Chapter 18. Working with Special Characters

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding glyphs

• Accessing special characters

• Working with inline graphics

Both Illustrator and InDesign allow you to handle typography like a master, especially when working in conjunction with the OpenType fonts that offer you thousands of character selections. InDesign, in particular, with its abundant set of menu commands and palette options, is the most powerful typesetting tool developed to date for desktop computers. With it, you have the ability to set high-quality type that rivals the output from professional typesetting machines used before the computer revolution.

Older PostScript fonts give you a maximum of 256 different characters, or glyphs. With the OpenType fonts, however, you get as many as 65,000 glyphs per font. These additional characters offer you many more options for pairing characters in ligatures, customizing fractions, accessing foreign language characters, and working with a wide variety of symbols and special characters that can be used as type or graphic elements.

Working with Glyphs Palettes

Both Illustrator and InDesign have a Glyphs palette that shows you, at a glance, the different characters available in any given font. It's much like the old Keycaps control panel available in earlier Mac operating systems. In addition to viewing glyphs in a scrollable palette, you can also create custom glyph sets in InDesign and you can view different special characters by selecting menu options in the palettes ...