Chapter 2 - Character Formatting - III (PageMaker)

Applying Type Styles:

To emphasize key words and phrases in your document, you can use a variety of type styles. These styles are listed on the Type Style submenu under the Type menu. However, applying the reverse type style requires some special consideration. The reverse type style switches the character color from black to white. If these characters are on a white background, the result is white text on white background – invisible type. Therefore, when you specify type style, you must also change the background to black or some other color or shade. To shade the background of reversed type, draw a shape around the text with one of the drawing tools, and then fill this shape.

Using the Character Specifications Dialog Box:

If you need to make more than one change to the type (for example, change its font and size or specify bold and italic), choose Character from the Type menu, or press Ctrl + T. This displays the Character Specifications dialog box, which offers drop-down lists for specifying the font and size, as well as check boxes for selecting type styles.

The Character Specification dialog box provides additional ways to format characters. The Case option’s default setting is Normal, which means that characters will appear in the case in which they are entered. The other options are All Caps and Small Caps. Using the Case option called Small Caps, you can capitalize all characters, with lowercase letters 70 percent of the size of the uppercase letters. To change this percentage, click the Options button in the Character Specifications dialog box. You can then fill in a different percentage next to the Small Caps Size.

Leading sets the vertical space in which text is placed. Like Type Size, leading is measured in points. You can choose from three different leading methods to determine how the type sits within the leading space. You can specify leading as follows:

1.Choose the Auto option from the leading submenu to have PageMaker calculate the leading based on the size of the type. By default, the auto-leading value is 120% of the type size.

2. Choose any of the standard amount of leading listed on the leading submenu.

3. Type a custom leading value (in one-tenth of a point size increment) under Type>Leading>Other to specify a specific leading amount.

An example of how the text behaves under different amount of leading.

Tracking determines the amount of space between letters and words. Tracking is particularly useful for darkening or lightening a page (type with tight tracking darkens a page, type with loose tracking lightens the page) and for changing the spacing of selected lines of very large or very small type. You can also use track settings to make text fit in a defined space on the page. An example of how the text behaves under different amount of tracking. When you choose Type>Expert Tracking, PageMaker displays a submenu of six tracks:

1.No Track (the default setting) means that PageMaker applies no tracking and the letters and words are spaced as the original font.

2. Normal Tracking improves letter spacing by reducing it for large point sizes and increasing it for small point sizes, but adjusting it very little for medium point sizes.

3. Very Loose, Loose, Tight and Very Tight are used under special conditions.

Use Horizontal Scale to adjust the width of characters. You can specify a scalling percentage between 5 and 250% (increments of 1%) or choose from commonly used character-width percentages on the Horizontal Scale submenu. If the typeface you are using has a condensed or expanded font (for example, Helvetica Condensed), favour using that variant over the Horizontal Scale command. Horizontal Scale is valuable for special type effects, not for copy fitting, and not in place of condensed or expanded typefaces already available to you. You can also choose Horizontal scale from Type > Horizontal Scale.

Position is for typing text as subscript or superscript. All other options under the Character Specifications dialog box are self-explanatory.