Office For Mac

As a follow up to last week’s post on how to turn your Word doc into a work of art, I’m here to tell you more about the advanced typographic controls we added to Word for Mac 2011 and how you can use them to design some really impressive looking text. Take these, for example:

 

This post is also part of a new series of “Power Tip” blogs designed to get you more comfortable using new Office 2011 features. I encourage you to share your questions, comments and experiences so we can continue providing helpful hints that you can use every day. Now, let’s get started…

By default, you’ll notice that the new typographic controls are not shown in the ribbon. To add them, you’ll want to adjust the Word Ribbon preference setting here:

You will now see a new “Typography” group in the ribbon with six new controls:

These new controls provide you with the ability to control the advanced features found in some OpenType and TrueType fonts. Specifically,

• Ligatures
• Contextual Alternatives
• Stylistic Sets, including initial and final swashes and other typographic flourishes
• Kerning
• Number Spacing
• Number Forms

For today, let’s focus on the first four – which are used with text – and leave the two numerical features for another post.

Combining all of these typographic features, we’re about to give the following text passage a really impressive look. Recognize the passage? It’s the opening words to the US Declaration of Independence.

I put two copies of this text in a Word document to show you the effect of these controls:

One thing to note is that not all OpenType or TrueType fonts have these features. Several fonts that do support them include:

• Adobe Garamond Pro – Included with Adobe Creative Suite
• Apple Chancery – Included in Mac OS X
• Gabriola – Included with Office 2010 and Office 2011
• Minion Pro – Included with Adobe Creative Suite
• Zapfino – Included in Mac OS X

For the purpose of today’s demo, I felt the calligraphic style of Zapfino gave the best look for this text, and I turned on both kerning and contextual alternatives, which in this particular passage don’t have much effect:

Now, let’s turn on all the ligatures in Zapfino:

With this result:

To help give you a closer look, here are enlarged versions of two of the many locations in which ligatures were placed into the text:

The last typographic control, stylistic sets, require the greatest discretion, lest the text become almost unreadable like this:

Rather than use these sets for entire text passage, I will just use them for two words in the first line. Selecting “When” and looking over the choices in the Stylistic Set menu, the second Individual style set choice looks good:

Similarly, the seventh choice for “Course” also looks nice: (Notice that I have scrolled the menu of style sets, so what looks like the third choice below is actually the seventh choice.)

 

And here is the final result, transforming the entire passage, using all the new typographic controls in Word 2011:

Feel like you’re ready and excited to use the new typographic controls in your own documents? Let us know! We’re always interested in hearing how you’re using these tools and if there are more tips and tricks we can share to help bring your words to life.

You can also rest easy knowing that when you use any of these new controls with OpenType fonts, your documents will look just the same when opened with Word for Windows 2010, assuming the fonts you chose are also on Windows.  How do you know what fonts are in Windows? That’s the subject of next week’s tip…

-Kurt Schmucker, Office for Mac Evangelist