Character Panel not functioning

Question

I can't control kerning or line spacing with the character panel. It doesn't work. It worked yesterday and now all of a sudden it has stopped working. When I try and increase line spacing the number in character panel goes up or down but the text doesn't move. For kerning, when I select text it won't let me enter a number value, will only give me '0', optical or metrics.
I tried a restart (always worth a shot) and that didn't help. Any ideas????

Answer 1

The rule position is governed by the setting indicated in the dialog. 0 means it is on the baseline of the first line in the paragraph for rules above, or the last line of the paragraph for rules below. Positive numbers move up, negative move down. The keep in frame checkbox keeps rule above inside the text frame and pushes the text downward. It does nothing  for rule below.
Because this rule is bing applied as part of a style, every paragraph with that style will have a rule, whether there is text or not in the paragraph. Hitting Enter makes a new paragraph. If you wnat this only on some paragraphs you should define a different style with the rule for just those paragraphs, and remove the rule from other styles, or apply the rule as an override manually.
>I can move the text up and down (using the aA bottom left hand function in character panel) but the line does not move with it. Maybe I am selecting it incorrectly? Again, it seems like I could move all of it previously, by selecting the hairline, but now that doesn't seem to be working.
For goodness sake, DON"T DO THAT. That's baseline shift and should only be used to adjust the position of isolated characters. It took me a week to figure out why I couldn't edit ads at one of my previous jobs because my predecessor had used baseline shift on entire paragraphs. In extreme cases it's possible to shift things so much that you see a selection highlight on a different line of text when you select. If you need to move the position of the top line of text in a frame, use the text frame options and either change the top offset or pick a new "first baseline" option. Adjust the spacing between paragraphs by using either "space before" or "space after." Space before or after will not leave blank space at the top of a frame the way an empty return will. It can be built into a style and edited in the style definition to adjust all paragraphs using the style.
>For the tracking, I don't want to set to vertical justification necessarily, as that might be too much. How would I set the required leading (I could try a few things and see what seemed to what best). Mainly it's for when I don't quite have enough copy, and have too big a gap between end of copy and contact info, just to make it look a bit better visually.
If what you want to do is adjust the spacing in the lines to add or lose a line here or there, start by trying the judicious use of No Break to see if it makes things recompose more to your liking. By judicious I mean select a word that is currently hyphenated, or convert a space to non-breaking, not a long string. Applying No Break to too much text will force it into overset when ID can't find a place to break the line. If it isn't doing what you want, remove any No Break you've applied to avoid trouble if you edit later.
My next choice would be to select an entire paragraph, or group of paragraphs, and adjust the word spacing (Tracking adjusts the letter spacing inside the words, too, which can look bad). Ctrl + Alt + Backspace will tighten, Ctrl + Alt + \ (backslash) will loosen. The amount is governed by the settings for tracking and kerning in the preferences. If you find you are doing this a lot, and always in the same direction, edit the justification settings to increase or decrease the word spacing amounts.