You know what I’m talking about - here’s that column break, about the size of the serif on the d:Īlso, many of InDesign’s special characters and markers take on different guises depending on their position in the text flow (inline or at the end of a line) or if you’re viewing it in the Story Editor as opposed to the layout. But I haven’t found any guides that (1) Show the hidden characters in context, that is, next to actual text (I used the lowercase “d” and “b” for all my examples because of their straight edges) and (2) Show them really big, as though you had zoomed in to about 800% onscreen - as I often need to do when trying to identify a flea speck like a column break hidden character in 12 pt.

There are other cheat sheets around, I know, and the online help has a few of these pictured as well. (Note: the PDF is current as of 2012, and we now have a German version, too. The five-page PDF, about 450K, includes magnified screen images of every hidden character and marker to be found in InDesign, up to an including the new ones in CS4 (such as Hidden Conditional Text). So here’s my early holiday present to you: The InDesignSecrets Guide to Special Characters in Adobe InDesign.

But it just grew and grew until I realized, this makes more sense as downloadable PDF. Yesterday morning I started on a medium-length post to the blog about some interesting hidden characters I’ve had to identify in a recent InDesign project. See this post for details, and a link to download the guide (free membership required). Editor’s Note: The Guide to InDesign’s Special Characters has been updated for CC 2018.

Character direction indesign cc 2017