To start things off, we were taught about Character and Word Spacing. A key concept to take note of was the word "kerning". Kerning is the adding and subtracting of space between a particular pair of characters. There are apparently many types of kerning, and you can choose to either automatically kern type using metrics kerning or optical kerning, or even kern type manually. To give an idea to kerning, here's a useful diagram:
Before applying the optical kerning option to the “W” and “a” pair (top), and after (bottom)
Source: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/images/op_06.png
And, here's a fun and interactive website for you to get a rough idea of kerning, as well as trying it out!
Link: http://type.method.ac/
Next, we have Paragraph Formatting. Remember how in fairy tale storybooks, the first alphabet of the chapter would be larger and more fanciful than the rest?
Does this ring a bell?
Source: http://www.biljanakroll.com/images/projects/project_24_item_74.jpg
Well, this is made possible by Paragraph Formatting. Basically, this tool allows you to control the amount of space between paragraphs. There are also various aspects to this tool, such as using "drop caps" to increase the size of the first letter, etc., just like as shown in the picture above.
You can read more about paragraph formatting here:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6dd2a.html
Following that, we learnt how to apply line (stroke) settings. Adobe InDesign allows you to apply various types and sizes of your strokes, all via the Stroke Panel, which grants you the ability to control the "density" and appearance of your strokes. This function is definitely very interesting, as you can even set various shapes to the start and end of your lines, with such shapes ranging from circles to arrows. These are all available in the Stroke panel. You can also save your very own custom strokes, along with many other options to make your text look nicer and befitting your style!
Sample start and end shapes:
Source:http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/images/as_46.png
Last but not least, we learnt about "leading". No, not leading as in leadership, this particular "leading" indicates the vertical space between lines of text. Leading is measured from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the line above it. Baseline is the "invisible line" on which most letters sit. This tool is important as I'm sure you wouldn't want your lines of words to be too close to one another, making it seemed "clumped" together, and difficult to read. Well, whatever your needs, changing the leading is the way to go!
An example of leading:
Source: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/images/op_15.png
And here is a link for you to learn more about leading:
http://www.wikihow.com/Adjust-Leading-in-InDesign
These were just some of the stuff we learnt this week, as it was so very content-heavy. But nevertheless, everything we learnt was useful for sure, and it was quite interesting as well. For example, I did not even know that there were so many kind of strokes available for own own use. Well, I suppose everyday we learn something new!
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