Typesetting is a tedious and time-consuming process. Not every publisher can afford to invest in a typesetter or a typesetting program. Most people will read just about anything without complaint, and though the results are aesthetically inferior, using a Word Processor as a typesetting application is often a prudent business strategy. If your goal is to produce the world’s greatest book, professional typesetting is an essential part of the process.
Adobe InDesign offers a range of features specifically designed to make professional typesetting easy. Page layout programs like Adobe Indesign and Quark, allow typesetters to exert fine control over text.
Here’s an overview of how InDesign can be used for typesetting:
Styles: Styles allow you to quickly and easily apply consistent formatting to text such as font, size, colour, alignment, spacing, indents, and more. Using styles will help ensure consistency throughout the document.
OpenType Support: InDesign has great OpenType support, you can easily access every character the font has including swashes, ligatures, alternates and stylistic sets.
Kerning and Tracking: You can adjust the space between characters or the overall spacing of groups of characters with precision. Again to give your text
Hyphenation and Justification: InDesign has advanced features to control how much justification and hyphenation should be done, to divide paragraph lines in an optimal way. Even word processors do some Hyphenation and Justification, InDesign gives a lot of control to the typesetter.
If the paragraphs have been set to left or right then proper hyphenation will give you a tight rag. If your text is justified, then proper hyphenation will create a more natural text colour on your page.
use typesetting software that provides more sophisticated hyphenation options than “on” and “off.”
Master Pages: Design and apply templates for consistent layout elements (like headers, footers, and page numbers) across multiple pages.
Grids and Guides: InDesign has different types of grids to align all your text for consistent spacing, making the layout look orderly and balanced.
Guides: Use guides to align elements precisely and maintain a clean, organized layout.
Find/Change: InDesign allows you to perform advanced search and replace operations to quickly update text and formatting across the entire document.
GREP: InDesign allows you to use GREP expressions to style text which based on a similar pattern, or standardising a certain range of characters that follow a particular pattern. It can save you hours of tedious time.
Practical Tips for Using These Features
- Start with Styles: Define your character and paragraph styles early to maintain consistency and save time.
- Use Master Pages: Set up master pages to automate repetitive layout elements.
- Leverage Text Threads: Use threaded text frames for multi-page documents to manage text flow efficiently.
- Regularly Preflight: Use the preflight panel to catch and correct issues early in the design process.
By mastering these features, you can take full advantage of InDesign’s capabilities to create professionally typeset documents that are both visually appealing and highly readable.
this is another reason why a professional typesetter working with good page layout software will produce better work than an amateur with a word processor.