In this week’s InDesign Secrets episode, David Blatner unravels the mysteries (and hassles) of making fractions in InDesign text.

And we’re talking real fractions—not those regular-size numbers, both sitting on the baseline, separated by a common slash fake fractions like the one seen below left. David’s talking about properly scaled, baseline-shifted numerator, divided by a properly tilted fraction bar real fractions like the one seen below right:

There are two ways to make fractions in InDesign—the optimal, or "real" way seen above right, and the less-than-perfect "fake" way with regular-sized numbers sitting on the baseline, separated by a common slash, seen above left.

As David points out in the video tutorial, if you’re using an Open Type font, creating a properly scaled fraction is simply a matter of selecting the type and choosing Open Type > Fractions from the Control Panel menu. Of course, if your document is rife with fractions you’ll want a more efficient way to change all of your fractions at once, and for that, you’ll need to fearlessly tread into the world of GREP styles.

GREP styles search for a particular pattern in text—in this case “digit-slash-digit” (or, translated into  GREP, that’s “\d+/\d+”)—to apply a specific style denoted by you (in this case Open Type > Fractions). You can see in the video how to use this handy GREP feature to change all your fractions at the same time. David also shows you how to use another GREP style-replacement maneuver to remove unwanted spaces between your whole number and your fraction after you’ve properly scaled your fractions (these spaces will be there for fractions that have whole numbers associated with the fraction. For example, with a number like 18 3/4, the previously disproportioned “fake” fractions needed a space between the whole number, 18, and the fraction, 3/4).

Of course, this GREP automation relies on the use of an Open Type font. For cases where you don’t have the luxury, or desire, to use an Open Type font, David shows you how to manually create your own non-Open Type font proper fraction using Horizontal Scaling, Vertical Scaling, and offsets. By the time you’re through watching David’s less-than-nine-minute movie, you’ll never need to rely on an inelegant fake fraction again.

Meanwhile, for members of lynda.com, David’s partner in InDesign Secrecy, Anne-Marie Concepcion, has another member-exclusive video called Fixing unwanted hyperlinks in an imported Word file that offers a handy way to deal with what can be a maddening InDesign situation.

David and Anne-Marie will be back in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets!

Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series
• Courses by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS6 New Features
• InDesign CS6 Essential Training
• InDesign Styles in Depth

In this week’s InDesign Secrets episode, Anne-Marie Concepción reveals a secret for letting InDesign find the right diacritical marks for you, rather than having to track them down in the Glyphs panel (Type > Glyphs). If you select the words or phrases requiring diacritics and then change them to their language of origin, then you can get InDesign to supply the right marks via Dynamic Spelling.

For instance, let’s say I had the phrase in the figure below and wanted to add all the correct diacritics (one diaeresis, one cedilla, and one acute accent mark) to the French words in my sentence. First, I’d need to turn on Dynamic Spelling (Edit > Spelling > Dynamic Spelling), then select the text in question, set the dictionary to French rather than English, and then when I right-click on any word in my paragraph, I can choose the correct spelling with diacritics already applied. Note that because I’ve told InDesign to check the spelling of the second paragraph against the French dictionary, all the English words are marked as misspelled with the red squiggly underline. You can ignore that for the purposes of getting InDesign to give up the glyphs.

In the movie, Anne-Marie also has a tip for tricking InDesign when both the accented and unaccented versions of a word are technically correct.

Meanwhile, Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has an exclusive movie for members of lynda.com this week on how to use a single celled table to apply custom formatting. If you want to see more table tricks in InDesign, you can check out Diane Burn’s entire course on InDesign tables.

David and Anne-Marie will be back in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets.

Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series
• Courses by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS6 New Features
• InDesign CS6 Essential Training
• InDesign Tables in Depth

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets episode, David Blatner considers the annoying mystery of covered-up master page items, like headers, footers, and page numbers. Sometimes, although you may have used a master page to apply these items to every page, there are occasions when your headers, footers, and page numbers may get stuck behind a particular graphic or text frame on random pages within your document. In these cases, even when you try to send the obscuring object to the back (via the Arrange command), your running header or page number is still mysteriously hidden, probably because it’s on a layer that’s lower in the stack than the one that houses the offending item.

The answer, as David reveals in the video below, is to place these items on a new layer that sits above everything else. It’s relatively easy to grab master page items (running headers, folio information, logos you want on every page, etc.) and move them to the topmost layer where nothing can bother them. I have to admit that, while my own Photoshop files are full of layers to the point of possible obsession, I often forget to use and/or troubleshoot layers when I’m working in InDesign. David’s tip is a good reminder of how productive a little layer troubleshooting can be. It’s easy to think of folios as the bottom of the z-axis, or the canvas on which your individual pages are created, but it helps to break outside that thinking.

Note: If you’re a member of lynda.com and you’re unsure about how to get started creating your first master page items, David offers some foundational training on how to use master pages and insert a running header that changes throughout your document in the Creating and applying master pages movie from chapter four of his InDesign CS6 Essential Training course. While this particular movie shows you how to work with master pages in InDesign CS6, the information also applies to earlier versions of InDesign as well. If you’re using an earlier version of InDesign and you want to be sure you’re seeing your own version of the interface in the movie, you can also find this movie in David’s earlier CS5, CS4, and CS3 InDesign Essential Training courses.

Meanwhile, David’s partner in InDesign secrecy, Anne-Marie Concepcion, has a new exclusive InDesign Secrets movie for lynda.com members this week that discusses five tricks for impressing your coworkers with your mastery of InDesign guides. As a freebie tip—don’t forget, guides can also be applied to master pages to achieve convenient, consistent alignment across all of your document pages. It’s all about synergy in secrecy this week!

Anne-Marie and David will be back in two weeks with two more InDesign secrets.

Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series
• Courses by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS6 New Features
• InDesign CS6 Essential Training
• Creating Long Documents with InDesign

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets video, Anne-Marie Concepcion shows you how to create and import a custom dictionary. Imagine you have a long document filled with specialized words (like Blatner and Concepcion, for instance), you have Dynamic Spelling turned on and you see the ubiquitous red squigglies telling you that you’ve got a whole host of misspelled words. You know they’re not misspelled, they’re just the proper names of your favorite InDesign secret-keepers, and you have no desire to have to tell InDesign that every instance of those names is perfectly OK in your book. The answer is a custom dictionary filled with the words you deem legitimate for your particular document.

The secret is to share a custom dictionary with InDesign. In the free video above, you’ll see how this breaks down into three easy steps:

1. Create your custom word list and save it as a text file.

2. Create a new dictionary based on that list in InDesign’s Preferences dialog box.

3. Import the list using Edit > User Dictionary.

The final step would look like this:

Voila, all those red squigglies magically disappear with the power of this InDesign secret. (And, as a bonus, I’ll never accidentally write “Blanter” again.)

Meanwhile, Anne-Marie’s partner in secrecy, David Blatner (not Blanter) has an exclusive video this week for members of the lynda.com library called Changing document orientation and page size. In this movie David goes beyond the Document Setup feature—which just changes the orientation of your page—to explain how to change the orientation of your whole project, including altering the orientation of your page objects, one page at a time.

David and Anne-Marie will be back in two weeks with more InDesign secrets!

Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series
• Courses by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• Creating Long Documents with InDesign
• InDesign Styles in Depth
• InDesign CS4: 10 Habits of Highly Effective Pros