InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 18. Creating Special Text Formatting

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Working with bulleted and numbered lists

• Formatting fractions

• Creating reverse type

• Adding sidebars and pull-quotes

• Specifying optical margin alignment

• Creating custom underlines and strikethroughs

• Converting text to graphics

• Running text along a path

After you learn the basics of typefaces, character formats, and paragraph formats, you can achieve just about any look with text. The trick is combining and applying the skills you've learned to produce special effects that not only look professional but also enhance the meaning of the text.

Glance at any professional publication — a national magazine, direct-mail catalog, cookbook, or product brochure — and you see typographic techniques that set the publication apart from anything that can be easily produced in a word processor. (Even when word processors do offer a feature, they often lack the control necessary to really fine-tune an effect.) And skilled designers use these effects with a purpose — special bullet characters emphasize a theme, drop caps draw readers in, and pull-quotes tantalize the audience, for example.

Throughout this chapter, you learn how InDesign can produce special typographic effects and, more important, when to use them.

You can apply all sorts of formatting to text beyond those described here. For example, by using InDesign's object transformation tools, as covered in Chapter 10, you can change the look of entire text blocks such as through rotation and scaling. ...