InDesign Secrets

The Ingenious Chartwell Font for Making Graphs in InDesign

Submitted by colleen on 25 September 2011 - 12:15am.
Have you ever been disappointed by InDesign's lack of charting features (and really, how hard is it to be disappointed by something that's non-existent)? Over at lynda.com, Anne-Marie Concepción has a solution in this week's free InDesign Secrets episode. (Note: InDesign Secrets is David Blatner and Anne-Marie's bi-weekly series that gives you a free movie on some InDesign insight every week---think Deke's Techniques but with InDesign and slightly more sanity.)
 
The Chartwell font (yes, it's a font, I know!) from the inventive mastermind at TK type makes ingenious use of ligatures in order to turn simple text numbers into bars, lines, and pies.
 
In the movie, Anne-Marie shows you how to start by typing the mathematical equation that represents your chart numbers. You'll turn off InDesign's ligatures at first (seriously, part of the delight comes from having ligatures off, seeing normal text, then watching the magic happen when you turn them back on), then you simply apply variations on the Chartwell font and turn those numbers into corresponding charts when you turn ligatures back on. I'm pretty sure it's magic. It's definitely fun.
 
So, for example, let's say I started with this percentage breakdown, typed into InDesign, set in Chartwell with ligatures turned off, and each of the different values styled in a different color: 
 
 
Looks like normal friendly text, right? But, if I set the Chartwell option to the Pies font style (it's like setting a regular font to Italic or Bold) and turn the Ligatures on, the result is an automatic transformation into a pie chart that's set to those percentages:
 
 
Tip: In the video Anne-Marie explains how to turn your pie chart into the ring chart on the right by adding an alphabetical character to the equation. For the ring on the right, I added a +A to the equation, which is halfway on the a-Z continuum.
 
If I change the font family to Bars, the result is a bar graph:
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Solution to the Placeholder Return Issue (or It's Good to Have InDesigny Friends)

Submitted by colleen on 16 October 2008 - 8:34pm.

The intrepid newcomer and ominously named dekeWorld dweller, bware, was reading a post I did way back when this site was still spitting up pixel-based formula about how to customize placeholder text in InDesign. This morning, Bware wrote:

"InDesign ignores the return characters in my placeholder.txt file."

So I checked it out myself and had the same experience. All the carriage returns in my placeholder document were gone. So after trying a few useless ideas, I sent out the call for help to those keepers of the InDesign mysteries, David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion. A little while later, David emailed that he had a suggestion and because he was getting some similar queries he had put it here on their site, which should really be called:

 

David's suggested solution to the problem that bware and I were experiencing was to... Read more » 

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