Secret Grabber Cursor in Style Options > Tabs
April 8th, 2008Compared to adjusting tab stops in paragraph styles, adjusting them in tabbed text is a cakewalk: just open the Tabs panel (Type > Tabs) and start dragging tab stops around. The panel snaps to the top of the text frame (assuming there’s room for it) and adjusts its tab ruler width to match the text frame, all by default:
If there isn’t room for the panel — you’ve zoomed in so much that the top of the text frame isn’t visible, for example — you can always drag it manually into position, and use its Resize corner on the lower right to stretch or shrink the ruler as necessary.
But when you’re adjusting the tab stops in a style, you’re hampered by a tiny tab ruler that’s less than 5″ wide:
What are you supposed to do if you need to adjust a style’s tab stop that’s sitting at 6.125″ or something, out in the twilight zone to the right? You can’t resize the Paragraph Style Options dialog box, there’s no corner handle to grab onto. (And I’ve tried anyway, many times. Doesn’t work.)
To reveal hidden tab stops further down the ruler, some people just add a temporary tab to the ruler and then drag that tab to the right, which forces the ruler to auto-scroll over. But the autoscroll moves at a speed close to a bazillion miles per hour, invariably causing me to release the mouse button in a panic. Which means I now have an extra tab, and can I remember where I dropped it? When there’s a thicket of tabs? No.
Then I learned this trick: Hover your cursor over the tickmarks in the ruler and start dragging. The cursor turns into a little fist, allowing you to autoscroll the tab ruler without adding a tab, and the speed of the scroll is entirely under your control.
I made a little video to show you:
Pretty neat, huh? Muchísimas gracias to Brad Walrod, Quark/InDesign guru and an old friend, who mentioned this technique in a post to the InDesign mailing list a couple months ago.
I am glad you brought this up. I knew about the trick but I still think setting tabs in InDesign is very painful. In Word, besides being able to set tabs on the ruler, there is a tab dialog box that lists all of the tabs numerically. You don’t have to try and select minuscule arrows (and if you are off by a few pixels all of a sudden there is a new tab stop). You can then select the numbers and adjust the tab alignment and position very easily.
Anne-Marie does video — finally! (All right, all right: I know about your Lynda.com tutorials.) I didn’t know about the grabber-hand for the ParaStyle tab ruler, so thank you for this. It’s not properly coded by Adobe, though, since there’s no hover-effect when your mouse hovers on the ruler, hence I and zillions of others have been sadly ignorant of this handy feature.
You can use that same trick on the regular tab panel/palette to scroll left to right. Simply move the cursor over the ruler portion. When it changes to a hand, click and drag.
Fred, as for setting tabs numerically, simply click in the x: field and enter a number. Use the up down arrow keys to increase or decrease the value and watch as the new tab moves along the bar.
If you need to adjust an existing tab, with more precision, click the tab on the tab bar, click in the X field and use the cursor keys.
Seriously cool tip! Thanks
A better way to rearrange tabs is to select your tab, type the new value into the little field (as mentioned above) and then hitting the TAB button! Hitting ENTER creates a new tab. This drove me crazy before I discovered my little workaround.
A trich that I love is to select an existing tab and then to add and offset to the value displayed in the X entry field (eg: +1.625) and then press option-enter(Mac) to create a new tab with that offset without modifying the original AND without closing the Paragraph Style Options dialog box.
A trick that I love is to select an existing tab and then add an offset to the value displayed in the X entry field (eg: +1.625).I then press option-enter(Mac) to create a new tab with that offset without modifying the original AND without closing the Paragraph Style Options dialog box.