What is the space after & leading in Adobe InDesign?

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at the Space after Paragraph, and we're going to look at Leading in the same go, where we turn this text right here to-- magic happens, and we've got some Space After, which is the space after these paragraphs here, and we've opened up the Leading a little bit between the lines. Let's go and do that now in this tutorial.

To practice, we're going to open up a separate file. Go to 'File', 'Open'. And in our exercise files, under '03 Newsletter', there's one in there called 'Space After'. Open that up. What I've done is, I've got two examples of how you might get 'Type'. One is, when somebody's been typing, they'll put one return in after the full stop. There's a full stop and a return to get down to the next line. Often this comes from modern versions of Word and modern versions of Word processors, because they add Space After by default. Older versions don't, so you have to put in two returns to get a bit of a gap between them.

So when you bring them into InDesign they can look different like this, this one has two returns and this one has one. How do you know there's two returns? We can look at something called Invisibles. So go to 'Type', and go down the bottom, it says 'Show Hidden Characters'. When I said invisibles, I meant hidden characters. We can kind of see here, that is the symbol for paragraph breaks. So there's been a return, and then the next line starts. Whereas here, you can see, there's a return and then to put in another space put in another return, so there's two of them. Let's look at how we treat both of those with our Space After.

I'm going to turn off my 'Hiddens', or my invisibles. What I'm going to do is select all this text here. And what I'm going to do is go to 'Paragraph'. We were on 'Character' before, click on 'Paragraph'. The Space After is this one here. It's a little bit hard to work out who's who. We're looking for that icon, if you hover above the icon there it will tell you, "I am Space After.". So I'm going to click on it, and then I go up. Now mine's in millimeters, yours might be set in inches, just go up until-- there's no specific amount you need to have. It's more of a visual guide, like what you feel is a nice bit of gap between the paragraphs. So that gives you really good control over the space between them over a long document. Whereas this one here is going to be a little bit different. Say I want to make this smaller, and what people tend to do is, if you want to make this smaller and you do kind of cave man Space After, people just highlight this thing here, you've probably done it before. I've done it.

Go to 'Character', and you make the font size smaller. You can kind of do that, but you can see the problem when I have to do to this one, then to this one, and then if the client comes back and says "Hey, that 100 page document you're working on, can you adjust the Space After?" And you've done it this way, you say, "No, that is far too hard." So what we need to do is, we need to-- I'm going to 'undo' it a few times, so that's gone. And what we need to do is clear out the double returns. Just so they're singles, like the top here where it's nice and easy to control.

To do it, we need to remove them. We can do it manually, of course. This is only a small bit of text, so we could just go through and actually delete the extra returns. But say it's a longer document. We want to be quick, I've selected all the text, we go to 'Edit', there's one in here called 'Find/Change'. This is just regular find and change. Find a word, change it with another word. We're going to use this one at the top here called 'Query'. There's some pre-made, what's called grab find changes. We're going to use this one that says 'Multiple Return to Single Return'. It's going to go through all my document. That's the code, the grab code for double returns. And it's going to switch it out for a single return. And I'm going to go to 'Change All'. And it's found similar placements, and now I click 'OK'. You can see, it's done it all in one big go. I find this is a really quick, easy, helpful way. Just to make sure you've got single returns. And I've selected it all, and I'm going to add Space After Paragraph. I find 3 millimeters is good, I'm not sure what it is in inches. But it is just a personal preference.

Before we go, we'll look at Leading. Space After is the gap between paragraphs. Leading is the gaps between actual lines. Because they're kind of similar, so let's select it all. And we're going to go back to character, and there's this one called Leading. Leading is an old fashioned way of calling it. Line Spacing. So what we're going to do is increase it up. The paragraph spacing is the same but the space between the lines is different. So you adjust those separately. And that my friends is Space After.

What we'll do now is go through and just adjust this one here. I'm going to first of all select it all. I'm going to make my font 'Roboto'. I'm going to make it 'Regular'. I'm going to make the font size '10 points'. Body copy in magazines, they need always 10 points. It can be a tiny bit less, not too much more, because it then becomes hard to read. 12, you'll find, if you print it off, it's quite big. Do a test, print it off, check it out, yes, 12 is too big. So you might choose 10.5 or 11. There's no official number, but 10 points is normally it.

Now in terms of the Leading, I might open it up just a little bit. Defaulted to 12, I'm going to run that up to 13. And now I'm going to play around with Space After, which is just under 'Paragraph'. There it is there, I'm going to increase this up. This document is 7 inches. So that looks good. I don't like that, a little bit more. That looks okay, nice. Great. Let's move on to the next video.