The Glyphs panel and special characters in Layout

Glyphs are the individual shapes a font contains, and a good font has far more of them than the keyboard can reach: accented letters, symbols, fractions, alternates, ornaments. The Glyphs panel in Layout by Zaweba shows every glyph in a font and inserts the one you click. Alongside it, a set of special characters handles the spaces, dashes and breaks that typesetting depends on.

The Glyphs panel

The panel shows all the glyphs of the chosen font, plus a row of recent glyphs. Click one to insert it at the text cursor. Recent glyphs keep the characters you use often to hand, so a degree sign, a copyright symbol or an accented letter in a name is one click after the first time.

It's also a good way to explore a font before using it. Scroll through and you'll see what it offers, and whether it has the characters a job needs, such as the accented letters for a French or Polish name.

Dashes, spaces and hyphens

Special characters include the em dash and the en dash, which are the longer and medium dashes used in typesetting. The en dash is the traditional choice for ranges such as pages 10 to 20 in a printed reference.

There are fixed width spaces: em, en, thin, hair and figure spaces. A thin space can sit between a number and its unit; a figure space is the width of a digit, for lining up numbers in a column.

A non-breaking space keeps two words together on one line, such as a title and a surname, or a number and its unit. A non-breaking hyphen does the same for a hyphenated term. A discretionary hyphen marks where a word may break if it needs to, without showing a hyphen when it doesn't.

Indents and breaks

Indent to here sets the indent for the rest of the paragraph at the point where you insert it, which is the neat way to hang the text of a list after a bullet or number. The right-indent tab pushes what follows to the right edge, useful for an end mark at the close of a magazine article. End nested style here marks where a nested style stops.

Column, frame and page breaks force the text to the next column, frame or page. Use them for deliberate breaks, such as starting a new section at the top of a column, rather than pressing Enter repeatedly.

Show hidden characters

Hidden characters can be shown, revealing spaces, tabs, paragraph ends and breaks as small marks. It's the fastest way to understand why text behaves strangely: two spaces where there should be one, a tab you didn't expect, a forced break left over from an earlier version.

Special character slips

Typing several spaces to line things up rather than using a tab or a fixed space. Using a hyphen where a proper dash belongs. Pressing Enter to push text down instead of using a break or a space before setting. Each of these looks fine until the text is edited, then falls apart. Showing hidden characters makes them obvious.

The Glyphs panel and special characters are small tools, but they're much of what makes type in Layout by Zaweba look professionally set rather than simply typed.