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making inch marks
Posted by Stonetramp in
27 Sep 2007 — 2:31pm
27 Sep 2007 — 2:31pm
This should be SO easy, and maybe it is, but I can't find ANY information in my ID manuals or ID Help on how to make inch marks. In Quark you just use the control key, so I am sure there must be a simple way to do this without turning off curly quotes in Preferences every time an inch mark is needed.
So can someone enlighten me?
Much thanks!
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27 Sep 2007 — 2:52pm
Use true primes or double primes for foot and inch marks. Not quotation marks. Not the up-and-down primes you get with the control key. I use the Universal News + Commercial Pi font.
Hit 8 for single prime. Hit 9 for double.
They look so much better than the others. I'm sure other typographers have other ways to do this.
good luck.
powers
27 Sep 2007 — 3:06pm
There's got to be a way to do this without having a special font. Anyone else?
27 Sep 2007 — 3:18pm
They are in the basic Symbol font which comes with the OS.
Nowadays, some foundries are putting these characters in their OpenType fonts.
I am, but haven't released any yet.
So you would use the glyph palette to set them.
You could cheat by using the "hungarian umlaut" -- a double-acute accent, which might do the job depending on the font, and which is easily accessible with option-shift-g.
27 Sep 2007 — 3:44pm
In ID3 just hold down Alt instead of Ctrl. But as others have pointed out, that doesn't produce true inch marks, it's just a convenient way to get non-curly quotes.
True primes can be found at Unicode U+2032 and U+2033. They're under the Punctuation category in ID's glyph palette.
27 Sep 2007 — 4:23pm
Ah! Thanks Nick, that's what I needed!
27 Sep 2007 — 5:31pm
As has been mentioned, most fonts don't come with U+2032 and U+2033.
But . . .
When making these up for a font that lacks them, skewing a "quotesingle" works about as well as rotating it -- better in some ways, worse in others. I tend to use a little of both. So, in InDesign, you could set the quotesingle & then just slant it about 15 degrees for a reasonable prime/minute/foot. And of course, the quotedbl for minute/inch.
FWIW
27 Sep 2007 — 7:40pm
Charles, let's hope Thomas, John or Adam don't see this thread, or we could be in big trouble...