Indiscripts

Many fonts offer a wide range of Unicode characters. Does your text require a 'Ű'? Minion Pro has it. Go to U+0170 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DOUBLE ACUTE. Or do you need an umbrella glyph? Segoe UI Emoji supports U+2602… Of course you can access any element from the Glyphs panel, but when you already know the codepoint to be rendered, why not just ask InDesign to parse the code you've just entered?…

While hyphenation settings can be adjusted at the Paragraph level, Character options only provide a boolean “No Break” attribute which prevents line breaks whatever the location of the text in the layout. There are cases where this binary parameter seems too rigid…

While both IndyFont and Unicode support hyphen variants such as U+2010 HYPHEN, U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN, and of course U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN, it looks like InDesign does not clearly distinguish character from glyph paradigm in this particular topic. In short, InDesign tends to render all hyphen characters using the same prototypical glyph, which is not necessarily in line with your desire…

When it comes to pasting text from another document or application, InDesign provides two options, either keeping the original text attributes, fonts, styles (the full 'Paste' feature), or removing all attributes ('Paste without formatting'.) We also have tools and preferences in the field of style mapping, but on many occasions these features do not fit the need of dealing quickly with basic formatting problems. Here RichPaste comes to the rescue…

A typographer friend of mine wonders about the most convenient way to create text samples having arbitrary line wraps without hyphenation. Such layout is commonly used in foundries when preparing typographical specimens. Customers should be able to visualize the native behavior of the typeface without justification artifacts, therefore the sample text must be left-justified with no custom tracking/kerning/scaling applied…

Here is the new release of our coolest InDesign toy! Wordalizer 1.5 for InDesign CS4/CS5/CS6/CC can now digest large corpus (up to 1,000 entries) and generate many styles of word clouds, based on geometrical patterns, color themes, or even multiple fonts! Open any source document (or book) and let Wordalizer extract the meaningful vocabulary from your text. Edit the word list as needed and adjust the settings according to your mood.

Our friend Mike Rankin (editor in chief of CreativePro.com and InDesign Mag) has recently released a rich Font Management Essential Training course at Lynda.com. Among many topics (TrueType vs. PostScript vs. OpenType; using web fonts; installing, activating and deactivating fonts; using Mac Font Book or Suitcase Fusion; identifying fonts…) Mike discusses creating fonts in InDesign. His screencast is an excellent introduction to IndyFont and, the icing on the cake, Lynda's team has agreed to offer free access to it. Thanks to them all :)