From the course: InDesign Secrets
242 When a tab really means new line - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
242 When a tab really means new line
- [Voiceover] I'm a big believer in making documents be flexible so that when a design changes, you don't have to do a lot of extra work. For example, in this document here we have these big drop caps, right? But maybe my art director just told me that each of these letters have to go above the line like separators instead of at the front of the paragraph. Fortunately, I just happen to have a different paragraph style over here in the Paragraph Styles panel that might do the trick. Let's try it. I'm going to select those five paragraphs and then click on List Style 2. There it is! With one click, it changed all of them and the letters are on their own line. Now, how did I do that? How did I make this paragraph style force the text down? I can think of several ways to do this but here's one great solution. Use tabs. Now, tabs usually push text to specific horizontal location, right? Like here, let me go back to the way it was, Command Z or control Z on Windows. Now, there's a little tab character after each one of these letters. I can kind of see that by going to the Type menu and choosing Show Hidden Characters. Can you see those little blue double headed arrows? That's the tab character. Now, in the paragraph style, let's just double click on List Style 1 here to see what it's made of. Now, I can see if I click on this Drop Caps and Nested Styles pane, that this paragraph style applies a drop cap. It goes two lines down and it's two characters wide. That is the letter and the tab. And, it's going to apply the character style, DropV1. That character style applies the font, the size and so on. Now what about that tab, where's it going to? Well let's click on the Tabs pane in the list on the left, and we can see this little arrow right here near the left edge. That's the tab stop, that's where the tab is going to push the rest of the text to. So that's all very straight forward, let's go ahead and click Cancel and let's look at the other paragraph style. In this case, I'm going to right click on this style and choose Edit. I like using the right click technique because it let's me edit this paragraph style without applying the style to the currently selected text. Here, I'll go to the Drop Caps and Nested Styles pane, and you can see there's no drop cap applied here. Instead, there's a nested style. This character style, RaisedV2, is being applied through the first word. And in this case, the first word is just that first letter. Now once again, this RaisedV2 style is a character style, and that applies the color, the font, the size and so on. Now what about the tab? That's interesting. If I click on the Tabs pane, you can see that this tabstop is gone. But if I look way over here, I can see one out here to right of that little triangle. Now that triangle represents the right margin. So in other words, a tabstop is outside the margin. Now this is kind of weird but it turns out that it has a good use because if the tabstop is outside the margin, then it forces InDesign to break to the next line. Let me show you, I'll click OK, I'll select some of this text and then I'll apply List Style 2. See what's going on? It's applying the character style to the first word which is this letter and this tab. The tab goes all the way to the right margin and because it can't quite get to the tabstop it forces the rest of the text down to the next line. Now in some cases, this line breaking behavior can be annoying, but in this case it's actually exactly what we wanted. It's making the tab character act like a new line character. What do they say? When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Well, when you know how all of these features work you can twist them around to your advantage. And this line break trick is a great example of that.
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Contents
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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