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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