InDesign Best Practices 2: Line Paragraph Spacing

There are many ways to space lines and paragraphs in InDesign. You can even pretend it's a typewriter and hit the Enter key at the end of each line and then hit it twice at the end of each paragraph. (The Enter key used to be known as the Carriage Return key from the days of manual typewriter which required you to do this.) But there are better ways, and the main way is through Paragraph Styles.

There are many different styles of typesetting (which is really what you're doing with InDesign), and you won't go wrong learning about them by reading Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typography and only The Elements of Typography. Buy the hardback version, you'll want to keep it on your desk (I am looking at my copy right now. (Did you know that Brighurst was the Canadian Poet Laureate? And that he worked for Adobe?) But to get back to best practices, here are a few.

• InDesign contains a relatively new function called Style Packs (see https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/work-with-style-packs.html) and comes with 20 preset style packs. To me, they look like imports from the 1991 Microsoft Publisher 1.0, and I don't think I'll ever use them. On the other hand, I do share paragraph and character styles among my documents, and I suspect for my next big project I will use Style Packs. My current practice is keeping my paragraph and character (and object and table) styles in an InDesign document called "Chapter Template" and using it as the Style Master in the InDesign book file (Book Panel) for all four of the volumes of my current textbook. That allows me to keep the styles synced across all the chapters. But having a Style Pack would make this simpler.
• If you're doing a single small document, say one page, you can not worry about styles and just use the icons at the top of the screen to format the text as you want it.
  • However, InDesign shines at reusing the creative work you put into that one-page document. Select some of the text you formatted and save as either a Character Style or more likely a Paragraph Style. (See https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/paragraph-character-styles.html.) Name your styles something you can remember in case you want to use them again. Consider saving the styles that work together as a Style pack.
• If you're setting up a longer document:
  • As Bringhurst recommends, consider making most if not all of your text line up with equally-spaced invisible lines across your page; for example, have 10-point text on 12-point invisible Baseline Grid. You can do this by making such a Baseline Grid visible and make sure everything lines up with it; see https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/grids.html and https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/layout-grids.html.). You can also use a grid for aligning graphics to the same 12-point grid both vertically and horizontally (Document Grid), turning on the Snap to Grid option, which is what I like to do. Or, you can simply make sure that all of your paragraph styles (or making your Paragraph Styles multiples of 12 points, which is what I do; see next bullet point).
  • Create or modify a couple of heading styles (H1 and H2 or Heading1 and Heading2, for example) least two paragraph styles: FirstParagraph and Body, for example. (Having the first line of the first paragraph flush left and the first line of succeeding paragraphs indented a bit is fairly standard.)
  • If you're going to create a Bullet style for bullet points (see https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/bullets-numbering.html) create a style Bullet, but also – so the last bullet point doesn't look crowded against a following Body paragraph, also create a Bullet with Space After style.
  • If you're going to want a multi-level bulleted list, you'll need to create styles such as Bullet 2, Bullet 3 and the like for each one. You'll also want to create Bullet 2 with Space After and Bullet 3 with Space After styles.
• Pro Tip: Bringhurst really likes bullets that hang out into the left margin. InDesign doesn't currently offer this, but there is a very-kludgy kludge that allows this. Warning: this may not be worth your time and effort.
  • Create a Bullet in Margin Paragraph Style that is aligned left rather than left justified, to prevent the marginal bullet spacing from getting crazy. To create a line with a bullet in the margin, which can then be saved in a “Stuff to Copy” .indd file, do the following
  • Format the line with the Bullet in Margin paragraph style.
  • Enter a space, your bullet character, another space, then your text
  • Place the cursor before the bullet character with nothing selected
  • Character Panel > Kerning (V/A on left) > -800 (or at least that was about right for what I was doing)
  • I made a list of lines with Bullet in Margin with these bullets in the margin. That way I can copy and paste a bunch of lines with the styles and with the bullets rather going through these magical hand-passes every time.