Adobe InDesign is a very powerful and surprisingly easy program to use. Ease of use aside however there are things that one must know if they want their documents to look professional, it takes more than slapping some text and graphics on a page. One the most important things is proper use of Type. Nothing screams amateur more than a document that doesn't use type correctly. In fact type is even more important than the graphics, graphics for the most part can be pretty bad and still be ok. But, when type is done incorrectly it shows and it completely detracts from the rest of the document and gives the entire document an unprofessional feel.

 

InDesign Type is a modest sized book that will help you use type correctly. This is not a book on how to use fonts, but a book on how to use the incredible array of type related tools in side of Adobe InDesign. Tools like character level formatting, nested styles, the Adobe paragraph composer, the Optical Kerning features, the support for OpenType fonts and much more. It is in-depth but easy to read and understand there lots full color examples and screen shots to help you understand what is being taught.

 

Chapters:

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Going with the Flow
Chapter 3: Character Reference
Chapter 4: Getting the Lead Out
Chapter 5: Kern, Baby, Kern
Chapter 6: Sweating the Small Stuff: Special Characters, White Space, and Glyphs
Chapter 7: OpenType: The New Frontier in Font Technology
Chapter 8: Aligning Your Type
Chapter 9: Paragraph Indents and Spacing
Chapter 10: First Impressions: Creating Great Opening Paragraphs
Chapter 11: Don't Fear the Hyphen
Chapter 12: Mastering Tabs and Tables
Chapter 13: Stylin' with Paragraph and Character Styles
Chapter 14: Mo'Style
Chapter 15: Setting Up Your Documents
Chapter 16: Everything in Its Right Place: Using Grids
Chapter 17: Text Wraps: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Chapter 18: Type Effects

As you can see this books covers a lot and is very complete. If you want to ensure that your documents look professional then start with your type. Once you have that correct the rest is a piece of cake. I highly recommend this book for anyone that creates documents with text and uses Adobe InDesign to do it.