Copyfitting InDesign text

I'm in Abuja, Nigeria this week doing InDesign and InCopy training for one of the media companies here. One of the things that I've taught is the various ways to make text fit a fixed amount of space in InDesign.

Here's a list of the ways that I can think of to adjust body text so that it will become slightly shorter or longer to fit a fixed amount of space...

1. The best way to copyfit, (without affecting the typography) is to edit the text. An InDesign-InCopy workflow makes this really slick, allowing a copy editor to edit the text to fit the space in the context of the InDesign layout.

2. Select all the text, and apply a tiny tracking adjustment to the text. Do this with the control panel, the character panel, or the following shortcuts:

Macintosh:

option-left arrow/right arrow (to adjust tracking by the amount set in preferences)

command-option-left arrow/right arrow (to adjust tracking in 5x greater increments)

Windows:

alt-left arrow/right arrow (to adjust tracking by the amount set in preferences)

ctrl-alt-left arrow/right arrrow (to adjust tracking in 5x greater increments)

3. Select all the text, and adjust the word kerning by a tiny amount. Do this with the following shortcuts:

Macintosh:

command-option-delete (to remove space between words)

command-option-\ (to add space between words)

(add the shift key to multiply the amount by 5)

(command-option-q will reset the tracking and kerning values back to the default)

Windows:

ctrl-alt-backspace (to remove space between words)

ctrl-alt-\ (to add space between words)

(add the shift key to multiply the amount by 5)

(ctrl-alt-q will reset the tracking and kerning values back to the default)

4. Select all the text, and adjust the horizontal scaling by a tiny amount. Use the fields in the control panel or the character panel to do this.

Obviously, you could also adjust the type size or the leading, but both of these affect the appearance much more that the 4 methods listed here.

Keep in mind that doing a couple of these things in small amounts, rather than just one of the things in a large amount, will usually be less noticeable. In a perfect world, you wouldn't need to do any of them, but in narrow newspaper columns, under tight deadlines, these measures are often inevitable.