TIP 8: EN AND EM DASHES
En dashes are slightly longer than hyphens and are a
good substitute for the word “to,” as in “Chapters 1– 4” or
“8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.” To create an en dash, press Option-
Hyphen (PC: hold the Alt key and type 0150).
Em dashes are the longest of the bunch and imply
an abrupt change—like this!— or a halt in thought or
speech. Use them instead of a comma or period when
the former is too weak and the latter too strong. To
create an em dash, press Option-Shift-Hyphen (PC: hold
the Alt key and type 0151).
By the way, the names en dash and em dash are derived
from the lead-setting days when an en dash was the width
of the letter “n,” and an em dash was the width of the letter
“m.” Who knew?TIP 9: PROPERLY SPACED ELLIPSES (...)
An ellipsis indicates an omission, interruption, or hesitation
in thought, as in, “But...but...you promised!” Instead of
typing three periods (which can get broken across lines), let
your computer create the dots for you by pressing Option-;
(semicolon) (PC: Alt-0133 on the numeric keypad).TIP 10: SPELL CHECKER
Last, but not least, fewer mistakes are as embarrassing (or
avoidable) as a misspelled word. Whether you’re typing
five words or five paragraphs, be sure to run the spell-
checker before exporting your final file. To do this, choose
Edit > Check Spelling while a type layer is active.Happily, all of these tips apply to other Adobe apps, too, such
as InDesign. Be sure to check out the text tips in this issue’s
“100 Hot Tips” article (p. 49 ), including the ever-useful Roman
hanging punctuation option and some handy keyboard
shortcuts for changing size and justification. Until next time,
may the creative force be with you all! nTIP 6: SPACE BEFORE AND AFTER
Spacing is an important visual cue: Information that’s
related should appear closer together than information
that’s not related. (In design circles, this is known as the
rule of proximity.) Proper spacing makes it a lot easier for
people to read or scan a document quickly and understand
how it’s organized. To precisely control the spacing in
your document, use the Paragraph panel’s Space Before
and Space After options instead of adding extra returns.
To do that, put your cursor anywhere in the offending
line (don’t highlight it,
just click within it), and
in the Paragraph panel
(Window>Paragraph),
enter an amount (in
points) into one of the
fields circled here.TIP 7: HYPHENATION
Hyphens are for combining two words (such as “pixel-
jockey”) and for line breaks (when a word gets split across
two lines of text); however, some words are meant to be
broken and some aren’t. To prevent hyphenation, highlight
the word(s) you want to keep together and then choose No
Break from the Character panel’s flyout menu.
In this example, hyphenation changes the meaning of
the text in a humorous way (pun intended)!ALL IMAGES BY LESA SNIDER› › HOW TO> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ OCTOBER 2019[ 74 ]