Periods between Words!
Hey, who ever said the Internet is for Dummies? I just had my worst Internet search experience in years. I was designing a document, and got the idea that I could really use a little trick I had learned in 9th grade “Keyboarding” (our first typing class, go figure). The trick, as I was taught, was to make one piece of text align to the left of a given text box, while another piece of text aligned to the right of it, and periods filled in the whitespace between the two pieces of text (to create a literal line for the eye to follow, not that I was actually taught that). Well, I remembered that, but I could not remember how to do it in Word, Open Office, or InDesign (which I needed it in). So, I tried the InDesign search; that didn’t help, because I was searching for “periods between two words” and other such nonsense. I just couldn’t remember what this little beast was called.I ended up looking in the OpenOffice documentation, hoping it would be more specific and my “periods between words” might actually turn up something. No luck.So, I started my Google search to figure this out. I tried endless entries, and everything kept turning up absolute nonsense about grammar classes and such. I had to try another approach.I then remembered that I saw this often in restaurant menus, so I may be able to look up restaurant menu tutorials for Word. I assumed this was an easy thing, and could be found in a tutorial; No such luck. All I found were ads telling me of the wonderous (read: horrible) layouts I could buy for my restaraunt for the low, low price of $99! I had to try something else.I then went for the catch-all of “typography terminology”, then “restaraunt typography terminology”. I was hitting a dead end, I was about to just send an email to some good friends who would probably have known. I hit up Adobe.com and their search to no avail… it was an awful search, to say the least.Oddly enough, I did just what Jim Lanzone would want me to do and tried my search at Ask.com. Of course, nothing came up (they’re all searching the same Internet, “human” tools or not).So, coming full circle, I went back to Google and tried my luck one more time. I entered “making restaurant menus in word” – and, 5 entries down, I saw a Microsoft Office Assistant (read: Clippy) link. I clicked, fearing the worst, but was met with none of than an awful looking image of exactly what I needed – two words with a bunch of periods stuck in between it. I scanned the image, giddy with excitement and relief and found my Holy Grail of the night. They’re called Tab Leaders. I have no idea why, but I couldn’t care any less. I popped in my newly revised Google search “dot leader tab” and wham, bham, thank you designorati I was in business with my very own Indesign Tutorial on how to produce such an effect.With this blog post included, it took me 40 minutes for me to find this answer. It sickens me that it took that long, but I’m too full of joy to complain any more than I have.If I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that there aren’t any chat rooms full of people waiting to answer my InDesign questions, and that I still think Internet search sucks – as freaking sweet as it is.