From the course: InDesign Secrets

225 Discovering secrets of the Tabs panel - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

225 Discovering secrets of the Tabs panel

- I can't believe in all of these InDesign Secrets videos that we've done for lynda.com, that we've never talked about the Tab panel. Yes, the lowly Tab panel which you get, of course, by pressing cmd or ctrl t, right? No, of course not. Even I don't remember the keyboard shortcut for the Tab panel. It is cmd or ctrl shift t, there you go. There it is. Okay so, here we have the Tab panel and why would you ever use the Tab panel, I hear you saying, when we have this entire Table menu. Why would you ever use tabs when you can make a table? Well, often times, in my opinion, tables are overkill. If I just want to quickly align these numbers up for example down here, I might just do it quickly with the tabs. Also, if you are creating different tab stops in a lot of tabular data, when you select that text and you go to the Table menu and say Convert Text to Table, InDesign will pick your tab stops and make your column widths match the tab stops, a-ha! Yes, that's a great little tip. So sometimes I'll just start out with tabs anyway before I make a table just 'cause I find it easier to deal with. Why? Because watch, if I select this text and then I go to the Tabs panel and I say I want a tab right here, then they all move and I see that wonderful vertical line appearing. It's telling me where it's going to put the tab. Why is the vertical line so far away from where the tab is itself? That's because the Tab panel is not aligned with the frame containing the text. You can drag this manually to get a little bit closer so now as I drag it, there we go, that's a little better. And you can enlarge the Tab panel. Not a lot of people realize you can change the width, yes you can, to make the ruler extend from left to right of your frame so you can see the whole thing. But there's actually a built-in way for the Tab panel to align itself and that is with our friend, the horseshoe, no actually that's a magnet and that is supposed to position the panel above the text frame as the tool tip tells us. If I click it, nothing happens though. Why? Because we need to see the top of the text frame. So I'll zoom out a bit. There we go, we can see the top of the text frame now and I'll click the icon and it's still not working, why? Because we're seeing more than one page at a time. So I'm going to choose fit in window. All right, and now let's click the magnet icon. Ta-da! It automatically aligns itself, there you go. That's what that, and it's not good luck using the Tabs panel which is what I used to think, you know, of it being a good luck horseshoe. All right, so let's go ahead and create a few tabs. I'm just going to click right here in the Tab panel and where I'm watching the text down here as I'm dragging it. So I want that to be there and then this one I don't need. So if you find a tab that you don't need, you can select it and go to the Tab panel menu and choose Delete or just drag it off, there you go. And this one we want right over there, okay? If you need a Tab leader, you just select the tab here and then the tab leader little box, here you type one or two characters. If I type one character, and I press tab to show it you can see the little dots. If I want them a little spaced out, I can press tab space and that spaces them out. If you want to learn more about leaders, we actually have an entire tip all about that that David did way back, in episode 102, Making Tab Leaders Pretty. Since you're looking for more information about tab leaders, I highly recommend that video. Alright, let's go back here. I want to show you another tip. Did you know you can set the paragraph indents as well? So, I'm going to zoom in more. If I wanted the left edge of just these three to be indented a bit, instead of adding a tab in front, I could just drag this guy right here, which is for the paragraph indents. So, dragging the bottom one, drags both of them the first one, you can drag separately to make a hanging indent, or first line indent. I'll just keep them even for now. And, it's not just for things that have tabs, I mean, we could do it up here, too, for this paragraph, if I want the first line to be indented, I could drag this, and the first line becomes indented. Which is kind of interesting, you also have a triangle at the far right too, of the tab panel, once you drag it out. Or maybe just, it disappeared. One last tip that I want to show you, that has to do with this wonderful command called repeat tab. So, repeat tab is useful when you have a case like this. Say that we have some tabbed numbers and we want them to align with the right edge of the frame. I can create the first tab, so I'm going to just click right here, I think, and let's do our friend the magnet. There we go. And, you can see, that there is a default tab every half inch. I'm going to choose Clear All, and we're going to make our first tab. There we go. Now, if I want all the numbers to have the same amount of space as there is between one and two, then I select this tab leader, and I go to the tab panel menu, and choose, repeat tab, and it replicates the same amount of space. I don't even have to look to see how much space there was. It just does it. If I say, oh look, there's not, we still have a lot of white space here, so I'm going to move this over a little bit more. And I don't need to clear the tabs, I just choose repeat tab again which automatically clears the tabs. So that was a little too much, but you can get the ideas that you can go ahead and play with this until everything fits perfectly. Okay, now I'm obsessed and I have to make sure it all fits. I'll just choose one last time repeat tab. That's close enough. That's good. You can do it, by the way, for, you can mix this up, so I can have these first few over here, and then this one, I want to repeat. So I choose that one and choose repeat tab and it just does it for that one and the ones further down. So, it doesn't affect the entire paragraph just where that tab stop is and all the way to the right. So there you have it. A whole bunch of secrets for using the Tab Panel.

Contents