Paragraph Vs Single Line Composer In Adobe InDesign CC

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Course contents
SECTION: 3
Creative Cloud APP 5:45
SECTION: 12
Workflow Speed Tips 20:41
SECTION: 17
Photoshop & Illustrator 13:32
SECTION: 22
Exporting & Printing Tricks 8:17

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Course info

74 lessons / 9 hours Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Certified Expert for InDesign and I work as a professional graphic designer. This course is about advanced features, productivity & workflow speed tricks using Adobe InDesign. 

This course is not for people brand new to InDesign. It’s for people who already know and understand the fundamentals. 

If you are already happy adding text & images to InDesign documents then this course is for you. Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your InDesign mind. 

You’ll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit & Opentype fonts, font grouping & font pairing. Mastering colour features like the colour theme tool and colour modes as well as professional proofing for colours for print. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & will learn how to turn hyphenation off for good, once and for all.  

What would an advanced InDesign course be without all the tactics to fully control paragraphs, auto expanding boxes, spanning & splitting columns. You’ll become a Styles master, using nested styles, grep styles, next styles & advanced object styles.  

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your InDesign documents. You’ll learn the pros & cons of various digital distribution methods including Interactive PDF’s, EPUBs & the amazing Publish Online. 

You’ll become a master of long, text heavy documents, autoflowing, primary text frames & smart text reflow, cross referencing, indexes, text variables & the InDesign book feature. There is entire section dedicated to how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up InDesign and get it running super fast. 

We look at interactive forms & scripts. There is just so much we cover and I want to share everything here in the intro but I can’t. Have a look through the video list, there is an amazing amount we cover here in the course. 

If you’re one of those people using InDesign and you know there is probably a better way, a faster way to work then this is your course. 

Daniel Walter Scott

What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign 2018 or above. But you find that 95% of all the features in this course will work with earlier version of InDesign (e.g. CS6). A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 70 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content. 
  • Create PDF Forms
  • Master Long Documents.
  • Advanced Fonts
  • Master Styles
  • Shortcut Sheet
  • Create Charts & Infographics
  • Create Interactive Documents
  • Workflow Tactics
  • Shortcuts & Speed Tips
  • Advanced Creative Cloud Features
  • Tips for working with Photoshop & Illustrator
  • Using Scripts 
  • Exporting, Prepress & Printing tricks 
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind. 
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet. 
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew. 
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers. 
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts. 
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career. 

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for people who already know InDesign and want to take their skills and speed to the maximum level. 
  • This is an advanced InDesign course, so you’ll need basic InDesign skills to find this course useful. 
  • This course is perfect for anyone that already knows how to insert images & add text. 
  • If you a completely new to InDesign try my InDesign Essentials course before starting this one.
  • This course is perfect for anyone that has completed my InDesign Essentials course.

Course duration 7 hours 45 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, have you ever wondered why sometimes you can see this letter here, or these words here? This 'si'. Totally has enough room to fit up here. It's because by default InDesign uses something called Paragraph Composer. So if you are a real stickler about getting your lines to break right and you're trying, and you're like, "Why is he up here?" And you're trying to use soft returns and line breaks to try and fix it, or non-breaking, it's because by default it's doing this because it's trying to balance the entire paragraph. Not specifically every line. You can turn this on and off.

So with it selected, we're going to go to our Type tool. Up here, in our Burger menu, doesn't matter if you're a character or a paragraph, let's click on it, and we've got these options here, 'Paragraph Composer' and 'Single-line Composer'. We won't use these two here. These are for other languages. If you are dealing with like Arabic, Hebrew, or Japanese, you might be using these because there are lots of other special things that need to happen, but if you're just dealing with the English language or at least languages that are based on the Roman alphabet, you can toggle between these two.

So we're going to keep an eye on our little 'si' and we're going to click on 'Single-line Composer'. Nothing much is going to change, a few of them did. See, he came up now. So it's trying to balance this thing line by line. Kind of like typically how you would imagine it works. Now you as a designer get to go through and you could now be using break characters to kind of force that down, and do it yourself, but by default, InDesign wants to do it for you and balance out that whole paragraph. It's up to you.

Now if you prefer to stay on 'Single-line Composer' you can go to your 'Preferences', and change it in there. Now that's changed it for this one paragraph. If you want to change that by default you can go to your 'Preferences'. So go to 'InDesign', 'Preferences', 'Advanced Type'. If you're on a PC, it's under 'Edit', 'Preferences', 'Advanced Type'. Down the bottom here, the 'Default Composer' switch it to single line, and it will be like that forever. Single-line Composer versus Paragraph Composer; I'm unsure, sometimes I hate it when it tries to force letters where I don't want it, other times, I like that the paragraphs are all nicely balanced. You might have a stronger view than me, and you can change it as necessary.

All right, that is it for your Composer.

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