From the course: InDesign: Typography Part 2

Other types of indents - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Typography Part 2

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Other types of indents

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- [Voiceover] In this movie I'm going to look at last-line indents, and hanging indents. Last-line indents are used in price lists, on restaurant menus, or in a table of contents with long, multi-line entries. The purpose of a last-line indent is to create vertical white space around the prices or numbers, so that they're more easily read. This is the Last Line Indent field. I'm now going to recreate this, moving to the second page, and I'll select this text, and, to add a last-line indent, start by first of all, indenting on the right. I'm going to indent on the right by 48 points, and then come to the Last Line Indent field, and make that negative 48 points. And that will stick the prices out beyond the right edge of the text. Indenting an entire block of text on the left and right, is appropriate for a quoted passage or extract. Typically the type will be one point smaller than the body text, with a half-line space added before and after the passage. With hanging indents, all the lines of a paragraph are indented, except for the first line, which sticks out beyond the left margin. See, here with this paragraph we have an indentation of 24 points, and a negative first-line indent of minus 24 points. This hanging indent is achieved by applying a left-indent to the text, and then applying a first-line indent of a negative value, and typically, the same amount as you entered for the left indent. That's also the case in this example. Now let's look at this example of the table of contents. Indents are commonly used in table of contents, or technical documents, where the indentation signifies a lower level of hierarchy. With hanging indents, you can also align type on a point, by inserting a tab character. I'm going to switch to my normal view mode, and we can see that we have tab characters inserted here, and these tab characters will flush the text to the point of the left indentation. If I delete that tab character, and then re-insert, you see that it moves to 80 points, which is the amount of the left indent. The first-line indent is negative 80 points. So those then are some different ways to effectively indent your text.

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