David Blatner has a great run-through at InDesign Secrets on how and when to properly adjust the Baseline of your text.

We all get MS Word files from a client for placement in a brochure, booklet, newsletter, or magazine. We end up having to reformat the text by hand more often than not. But there is a better way, which Jamie goes into.

*That being said, I find Jamie’s solution to be more trouble than it’s worth by an order of magnitude. The problems with his methods are:
A) you have to go through the trouble of setting up the style sheets in word, being careful to name them the same as the ones you’re using in InDesign.
B) you have to do that for every Word file, because…
C) your client isn’t going to bother using your stupid Word file anyway

Now don’t get me wrong, his solution will work if you have a technically savvy client, or you work in an in-house design shop such as a magazine, etc. But the real-world realities are that it’s rare that you’ll find a client that will not make a mess out of this otherwise simple process.

But take a look at the article, because it’s quite informative. Even if your client refuses to use your perfectly stylized Word file, it’ll show you how to at least take some of the work out of the manual stylizing process.

Text anti-aliasing can be found in Photoshop’s Control Bar (usually located at the top of the screen) when you have the text tool selected. You’ll find it just to the right of the point size entry box, as seen in the screenshot above. You can adjust the anti-aliasing by selecting the options in the drop-down menu.

There are four anti-aliasing options, Smooth, Strong, Crisp and Sharp. Which one you use depends on the size of your text.

As you can see in the image above, larger text sizes look better with Smooth or Strong. Smaller text sizes tend to look better with Crisp and Sharp – with tiny text on a website almost always looking best using the Sharp setting. The image doesn’t really show the difference in smaller text as well as I would like, but if you adjust the settings in your own document, you’ll surely see the difference.

You can grab the free Magic 3D Photoshop Action here.

As InDesignSecrets points out: when you apply a gradient to text, the gradient is actually applied to the frame itself, it just appears to be applied to the text inside the frame. So the gradient can appear to extend beyond the text.

In the example above, I have the same black-to-green gradient applied to the text in all three text frames. But as you can see, only the bottom one shows the full gradient. That’s because the frame itself is set to auto-size to fit the text it contains. The two frames above it are larger, and the gradient adjusts to the size of the frame itself, rather than just the text.

So the moral of the story is: if you apply a gradient to text, make sure the text frame itself is sized to fit.

Adobe Photoshop‘s layer effects offer you great customization when you mix and match the different effects together. But unless you’re really talented, getting the effect you want can be difficult. Take the image above for example. It offers a fairly realistic 3D effect, but it’s really just two text layers on top of each other with different layer effects applied.

You can download the above free template for creating 3D gold-styled text, which comes in three different sizes.

Noticia Text, a nice slab-serif font. The regular, italic, bold & bold italic font is free to download and use in your design projects.

This can be particularly important to identify if you work in an environment where you’re not the only person editing the file.

To quickly identify kerned or tracked text, you need to visit InDesign’s preferences by hitting Command + K and select the Composition item in the left-side source list. In the Highlight section at the top, tick the Custom Tracking/Kerning checkbox and hit the OK button.

From that point forward, any text that has been tracked text will be highlighted in green, and any kerned text will be highlighted in orange, as you can see in the image above.

Instead, to switch to another tool, Command + Click on the text frame or hit Command + Shift + A to exit text editing mode. You can then hit the appropriate letter to switch tools, such as P for the Pen tool, or M for the Rectangle tool.

Simply copy the text as you normally would (Command + C), then move to where you want to paste the text and hit Command + Shift + Option + V. Your text will be pasted with no formatting whatsoever.

This is particularly useful when copying colored text with one font and pasting it into a new document that uses completely different fonts and colors.