InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 20. Using Special Characters

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Inserting special characters via menus, shortcuts, and the Glyphs panel

• Creating and sharing glyphs sets

• Using other tools for accessing special characters

• Understanding special spaces, dashes, and quotes

• Working with foreign languages

InDesign is a real internationalist, supporting 27 languages and 12 variants in its spelling and hyphenation dictionaries and providing easy access to foreign characters.

Even if you publish everything in English, InDesign's linguistic flexibility is quite useful, as the same mechanism that gives you easy access to foreign characters also gives you easy access to all sorts of special symbols — such as ¢, £, ©, and • — used in finance, mathematics, physics, and so on.

These symbols — whether regular letters, foreign characters, or special symbols — are called glyphs. InDesign offers menu options and keyboard shortcuts to use common glyphs, and the Glyphs panel to access specialty glyphs. Do note that many fonts have lots of glyphs available, which the Glyphs panel will reveal, but you'll likely need to buy fonts, called pi fonts, to handle special characters used in specific fields.

Note

Macintosh and Windows fonts come with a wealth of special characters called glyphs, and Mac OS and Windows fonts often have different glyph collections. If you work across platforms, this makes it important to use the same symbol fonts on both platforms and to be sure that you know the glyphs you use are available in all the ...