Typography

IDML's typography is a set of attributes on paragraphs and runs: which face, what size and spacing, which OpenType features, how lines break, and what happens around them.

In short Every typographic decision in an IDML story is an attribute on a <ParagraphStyleRange>, a <CharacterStyleRange> or one of the styles they apply. Character attributes pick the face, size, tracking, kerning and OpenType features of a run. Paragraph attributes pick the alignment, the composer that breaks lines, hyphenation, drop caps, tab stops, lists, keep options and column spans. This chapter explains what each family means and how InDesign spells it; each page notes in an aside how far Paged honours it.

Where typography is set

The paragraph model covers the shape of a story: flat paragraph and character ranges over a stream of characters. Typography rides on those ranges and on the styles they apply, resolved in the order described under conflict resolution. Three characters inside Content also matter here: the tab (U+0009), which moves the text after it to the next tab stop; the forced line break (U+2028), which ends a line without ending the paragraph; and the paragraph mark <Br/>.

In this chapter

• Fonts and facesAppliedFont names the family, FontStyle the face; Fonts.xml lists the fonts a document uses but contains none.
• Spacing and leadingTracking, kerning (KerningMethod, KerningValue), Leading and auto leading, baseline shift, scaling and skew.
• Composer and OpenType featuresthe Composer that breaks a paragraph into lines, Ligatures, Capitalization and the OTF… feature attributes.
• Justification and line-breakingthe Justification values, word and letter spacing, glyph scaling and hyphenation.
• Drop caps and tabsDropCapCharacters and DropCapLines, and the <TabList> of tab stops the tab character moves to.
• Lists, keep options and span columnsbullets and numbering, the keep options that control where paragraphs break between frames, and paragraphs that span or split columns.

The pages follow the order a reader meets these questions when setting a paragraph: the face, the spacing within a line, the breaking into lines, then the paragraph-level features.

Frequently asked questions

Where are typographic attributes stored in IDML? On the <ParagraphStyleRange> and <CharacterStyleRange> elements of a story and on the paragraph and character styles they apply. A few are typed <Properties> children rather than attributes: AppliedFont, Leading, TabList and some list settings.

Does an IDML file contain fonts? No. Resources/Fonts.xml lists the fonts the document uses, with their names and status, but no font data. See fonts and faces.

How is a tab written in IDML? As the tab character U+0009 inside <Content>, often written 	. The tab stops it moves to are records in the paragraph's <TabList>; see drop caps and tabs.