A Circular Ending

Sometimes you find yourself needing a quick way to accomplish tasks and assume that those methods somehow work the same across applications. I recently ran into a big issue over a small detail that tripped up the quality of my work, and that of others. I needed to turn a rectangle into a capsule or end cap, for lack of a better description. Not an oval, or just a roundly-cornered rectangle, but a shape that ends in a perfect half-circle. Where I currently work, this shape is an essential part of our brand identity.

There is a certain method you can use in QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator, combining a circle precisely placed halfway over the end of a rectangle using a Unite or Merge path function, also called Pathfinder in Adobe Land. (Some future time, I should explain and demonstrate Pathfinder more thoroughly. It’s the best graphic invention since sliced bread.) If you had the circle placed exactly halfway, you should get a perfectly circular end for the shape, with no doubled anchor points where the rectangle’s end and the half point of the circle overlapped. A look at the anchor points of one example created in Adobe Illustrator shows a proper result with just three anchor points.

However, I am one to try doing this stunt in less time and with less clicks. That’s my motto! I can create this using just one rectangle.

Here’s how it works in QuarkXPress: Copy the short width of the rectangle, paste it into the corner radius field on the Measurements palette and divide it in half. For example, if a rectangle had a short side of just 6 picas you would enter “6p0/2” into the corner radius field. (This allows you to use a rectangle of any measure; you don’t have to do the math.) Unfortunately, in QuarkXPress, you need to use a short size no more than 4 inches; QuarkXPress’ corner radius is STILL limited to 2 inches.
Anyway, I digress. What is your result? A perfectly circular end cap.

“Now,” I”ll say to myself, “I should be able to do the same thing in other applications. No problem.”
So, I’ll go into Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a slight difference, because Illustrator’s corner radius is not dynamically adjustable. You have to know ahead of time what the radius should be, and that totally depends on you knowing what the short measure of the rectangle will be when you draw it out. Have fun there. But if you have a dimension in mind, you can Option-click with the rounded rectangle tool, and right there enter the half of the short side’s measure for the corner radius (as shown).

Luckily, Adobe Illustrator also has a cool feature in the Effects menu for a square cornered rectangle you already have drawn out. (And it also works on open shapes too, so it’s handy for die lines and such things.) Select the rectangle, copy the short side’s measure from the Options bar, and go to Effects > Illustrator Effects > Stylize > Round Corners. Paste the measure into the radius field, then type “/2” after it. If needed you can expand the appearance of your end cap, but of course it’s not necessary.

What’s next? Adobe InDesign. And here’s where the trouble comes. I expected all these years that Adobe InDesign would act the same way as QuarkXPress and Illustrator. But I recently discovered that NOT to be true.

In previous versions of InDesign, you can use the Corner Options dialog to set it, similar to Adobe Illustrator. Curious and disappointing is the result you get if you want the perfectly circular end and input half of the short side. Compared to a true circle, you will notice the bulge. It doesn’t even pretend to be circular.

InDesign CS5 now has the ability to dynamically change the corner radius of any rectangle—finally, after 7 versions! However, even that doesn’t help us here. The results are still geometrically out of round.

So in InDesign, we come full circle to using Pathfinder to accomplish this task. Of course, even this beats manually splicing the two shapes together, which, more than 10 years ago, was the only choice for doing this.

Keep It All Together

How to prevent your type elements from breaking apart.

There are times you want to allow words to break down to the next line in a block of type. The judicious use of a discretionary hyphen – one that breaks apart a word if that word is close to the margin – is important for the proper flow of justified columns of text, for instance. The whole concept of hyphenation and justification is out of the scope of this discussion, however.

Much more often, where the text is somewhat more concise than a magazine or blog article, and its appearance is more critical, you really don’t want to see any hyphens, but then you may run into some other issues with your type. For example, you may see phone numbers break at the margin and finish on the next line, and you don’t want that by any means. You also may have a company or brand name that is not supposed to ever break into two lines. Harley-Davidson comes to mind here. Then there’s the pesky instance when your email or website address breaks at the “www.” or the “com” end.

For work on the web, there may not be much help besides a forced line break. But in printing, with a good layout application at your side, such as Adobe InDesign, or QuarkXPress, you have all the tools you need to accomplish this task.
Say, for example, you set up a contact message for your client; the usual, with the phone number, office hours, email and web address. If you don’t want hyphens, you should turn off hyphenation before you proceed. Now it is time to tackle some of those items you don’t want breaking apart.

Seeking a single line dial-up

Phone numbers are never easy to memorize, but that’s even more difficult when they break down to the next type line. A typical solution for many is to use a forced line break just before the phone number starts. This keeps the phone number on one line, but visually it may be on the wrong line, and you may end up with a large visual gap in the line above.


Let me just suggest right here that you make forced line breaks the LAST RESORT for fixing type events like this. Refrain from using them until the final tweaks of text tweaking. The whole issue is text flow. If a forced line break is in your type, and you for some reason change the type size or margin width, or edit wording in a paragraph or sentence, then the text flow shifts, and now the forced line break causes a new problem, and you need to delete or reposition it.

With the following solutions, you need not resort to the potentially problematic forced line break patch-up.

Nonbreakable

The answer for a phone number (at least, if it uses hyphens) is to use a nonbreaking hyphen. Nonbreaking hyphens are discrete, because they look and taste just like normal hyphens. But they have the power to hold words and characters on either side of themselves together.

Simply select the hyphens in the phone number in question and replace them with nonbreaking hyphens. Both QuarkXPress and InDesign have access to the nonbreaking hyphen character. InDesign can access it via a context-sensitive menu. QuarkXPress also allows nonbreaking en and em dashes, which InDesign doesn’t.

(What I am frustrated by with InDesign on a Mac is that even though you should be able to access a nonbreaking hyphen with a keyboard shortcut, the default command never works. I have used InDesign from CS2 through CS4 on several Mac systems over more than five years, and I have never gotten it to work, unless I set up a custom command.)

Another important helper is the nonbreaking word space.

Possible circumstances you will want to use this for is such things as dates (August 7, 2010) and times (7:00 p.m.) So just like the previous hyphen issue, select the word space between the words you want to keep together and replace it with a nonbreaking space. (I am happy to say that InDesign’s keyboard shortcut for this one works!)


Fixing the dot-com break

Because a website address begins with a “www.” and ends with “.com,” or such, there is a tendency for it to break at these points. This is where I used to place a forced line break before the beginning of the web address to fix the problem. I don’t do that any more. Why? Because I found a little special character called a Non-joiner tucked away in the Other sub-menu of the Insert Special Character menu of InDesign.
Technically, it is not a space. This makes it handy to place it between any two characters to prevent a break. (For QuarkXPress, you can place a nonbreakable flexible space and horizontally scale it down to nearly 0 width.)

So I place my insertion point on the right side of each “dot” in a web address and insert this non-joiner. Voila! This web address will not break any more. It will flow in the text naturally to whichever line it fits on best.


So wisely using these special characters will allow you to have more control over the look of your type, minimizing restrictive forced line breaks and similar inferior solutions.