How to Use Special Characters in Adobe InDesign

Special Characters are a wonderful feature of InDesign that can save time and add professional polish to the typography in a layout. Special Characters include commonly used characters, such as ® and ©, as well as lesser characters that can create all the difference in type treatment. In this example, I'll use Special Characters to stylize a quote.

1. In the example shown, the opening quotation mark should be hanging, and the hyphens should be em dashes.
2. To create a hanging indent on the opening quote, insert the text cursor after the quotation mark. Go to the Type menu, scroll down to Insert Special Character, then go to Other and choose Indent to Here.
3. To create the em dash, select each hyphen individually, then go to the Type menu, scroll down to Insert Special Character, then go to Hyphens and Dashes and choose Em Dash.
4. There are keyboard shortcuts for many Special Characters. The shortcut for Indent to Here is Ctrl+\ (PC) / Command+\ (Mac). For an em dash, it's Alt+Shift+- (PC) / Option+Shift+- (Mac).