Hello Anne-Marie, I just opened the glyphs panel and it is showing speech marks, although not the ones used in English fonts, it’s showing that mini version of two parentheses which are used as speech marks in a lot of Arabic books, so yes, it’s showing the ones I want but it’s not typing them, it immediately just changed to Minion Pro again.

You know I just went through the whole keyboard, pressing shift and every key to see if the speech marks would show, but they didn’t. In fact, with a few other shift + key combinations it even switched over to Adobe Arabic. Strange. I just bought this font the other week, it’s Linotype Lotus Arabic from their website.

Amazing, worked a treat, many thanks.

Interesting. Thank you for those book recommendations, I’ll look into them for sure.

You know you’re right about Lynda.com, I subscribed about four months ago thinking that I would check out a course or two and unsubscribe after the first month, yeah right. Those videos are indeed very, very good, I’ve watched five of your courses now, CC Essentials, Beyond the Essentials, 10 tips on GREP, InDesign: 10 Essential Tips, and the PDF for Print one, amazing stuff, really loved knowing what settings to change a PDF to for print/the web etc., this stuff is vital when you’re just learning from home, and currently starting Murphy’s one on Styles, and then your ones on Colour and Preflight. It consolidates in a more solid way what is written in the books when you see it done.

If you read this response, I have a question. I’m beginning to think I’m totally wrong with the spacing settings I use in general for fonts, remember I’ve no idea what you guys in the industry do so I’ve just automatically made things up and assumed that I need to increase the leading or justification options by a large amount to make things readable, I understand that I should do whatever looks good, but maybe in general I haven’t understood it because I see you guys only applying a small amount of leading to long document texts, like if it were a 12 point font maybe you guys would apply 14 or 15? Yes? But never something like 23? Which is what I would’ve done. [I know you guys are laughing now! “23? What a joker”] I was looking at your InDesign CC book and thought to myself that I’m getting it wrong cause the leading in that book doesn’t look as though it’s a huge amount and the books looks lovely. I looked at other books too and can see that the text is tighter than what I have been setting it as. Since even when I set the tracking in the paragraph to zero and applied the spacing in justifaction settings etc., I was going up to huge percentages like 170 or something, something ain’t right methinks.

So what kind of leading do you use for long texts? Also what kind of justifcation settings?

Thanks again.

Just went through those two links you posted, I had already come across the first one but the second was new to me, excellent stuff, those comments are really helpful too, once again, the last comment you made in the second post has sealed the deal for me, “It all depends on the font and the look and your design. There is no correct answer.” Makes things much easier.

Hmm, that’s very interesting. I’ll look into my faulty practices more then lol, boy do I have a whole load of catching up to do. That’s the problem when you’re learning how to typeset at home and are basically an armchair ‘typesetter’, would’ve been nice to work in the area so I could see all the different way people do things. Anyway, I’m currently living on Lynda.com and David’s books and some others too, we’ll see how things turn out.

Thanks for your responses.

Yeah, in this book recommended by David, ‘Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles, How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts,’ which seems excellent by the way, the author mentions that, ‘tracking should never be a built-in attribute of a paragraph style.’ But for this project I’m using an Arabic font and applying tracking at 50, otherwise the font looks too tight. But I’m applying that to the whole document, it doesn’t make sense not to apply it to the paragraph style, and when I do, the GREP style works fine. I think I’m gonna have to break convention? What do you think?

Second question: is it not normal to apply such tracking? I do that with Latin fonts too, I mean I normally apply tracking at 50, it looks better I thought in long documents, easier on the eye, or am I being silly?

Thanks.

@DCurry, thank you for your reply. I will not try to act as though I know what you’re talking about one hundered per cent, but I do have an idea since I was just going through the chapter on color by Blatner on Lynda.com as you sent that message, in it he was discussing things such as spot colour and swatches etc. I’m going to try and contact the printer and will also try to get my head around what you mentioned in the last paragraph over the next few days, depending on how fast I can get through these videos. The thing is I’m more of an enthusiast than someone working in the industry, I’ve always loved typography and type-setting but never got round to it, so now I’m learning it as an [almost full time] hobby and typsetting stuff for some friends, so because of that I don’t have any idea about what printing presses ask for or what their jargon is or what you guys who work in the field pick up on through daily interactions with each other. Hence the reason I’m beginning to live in InDesign forums lol. The only thing is it can feel embarrasing asking very basic questions, you tend to feel as though you may be bugging people by wanting them to break things down even more. I’ll get there hopefully.

Anyway, thanks for your input.

Thanks for the welcome, I think I will be sticking around especially because of how helpful you guys have been on here today, my first time posting.

The point you make about ePub/eBook is very interesting, because the project I have to get done will also have to be converted to some sort of an eBook in the end; it’s gonna be printed on paper, made into an electronic PDF and also has to be in an eBook format.

Lovely point about the kerning combinations. As well as English I have to typset in Arabic too so it will be interesting to see what things pop up there.

Again, thanks for all the feedback.