Comments on: Create Perfectly-Curved Hanging Indents

By: Diane Serpa

Diane Serpa — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:17:15 +0000

wooHOO! I so need this just now.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:51:57 +0000

@Robert: It sounds as though your main concern is the old search feature. Do you use Search at the top, or the Advanced Search feature? Advanced search is much better. That said, I think we can still do better and we’re working on that.

If you want to know the truth, I usually search our site with google, by typing “site:indesignsecrets.com search terms”.

By: Robert Bourassa

Robert Bourassa — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:53:43 +0000

this came up when i did a search for

“.75 point stroke”

this is the submission i did thursday Aug27

I tell ya, i sure miss your old website

t’was clean & simple…

search, find, read & learn then back to work.

Forgive my chronic griping, but your old site was BY FAR my most favourite resource.

C ya

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:39:15 +0000

Thanks. I’m actually after a much simpler thing – just getting hanging bullets to work properly when the text wraps to the right of a square box.

I’ve got it “working” using your fix of em-space, but of course then you have to know the exact width of your bullet character plus the em-space, to enter in your indents.

I’m new to InDesign (CS3) and it seems to be making simple things really difficult! In order to achieve this “automatically” it seems I need to make a separate text box and thread the boxes together. Yuk.

Big thanks for this post though, a useful work-around to a serious limitation.

By: Johannes Henseler

Johannes Henseler — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:28:27 +0000

i just used this tip at work and it works perfectly. even in connected frames on CS3, thank you!

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:38:43 +0000

Karla, if you’re doing this manually (not using auto bullets) in CS2, click an insertion point in the text, and then choose Type > Insert White Space > Em space.

However, if you’re using auto bullets, you’re right — CS2 doesn’t let you change the bullet separator, it’s always a tab. I’ll update the post accordingly.

Here’s what you can do, though, to get the same end result in CS2 w/auto bullets:

1. Set the bulletted paragraphs normally using automatic bullets. When they’re almost final …

2. Select the bulleted paragraphs with the Type tool

3. Right-click on the selection to open the contextual menu, and choose Convert Bullets to Text. Don’t deselect the text yet.

4. Choose Edit > Find/Change to replace all the tabs with em spaces in the selection. (Enter ^t in the Find field and ^m in the Change field, make sure the Search pop-up menu is set to Selection, and click the Change All button.)

Note that when you change from tabs to em spaces, you might need to fiddle with the left/first line indent measures a bit to get them to line up properly. This applies to both CS2 and CS3. (In the example shown in the post, the First Line indent is -1p4 and the Left Indent is 1p6.)

By: Karla

Karla — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:44:15 +0000

Hi Anne-Marie,

I’m afraid my CS2 doesn’t appear to give me the option anywhere of inserting an ‘Em Space’?

I’ve spent ages trying to figure out just how to get all lines to line up underneath each other when bulletted.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Karla

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:09:45 +0000

Hi James, they’re just normal hanging bullets–the first couple examples use InDesign’s auto bullets paragraph formatting (first introduced in CS2 I think). Then before I took the rest of the screen shots, I selected the text and chose Convert Bullets to Text so users could see the hidden characters, specifically the em space separating the bullet from the text. When they’re “normal” text they have a left paragraph indent and a negative first line indent, they usual way to create hanging paragraphs.

By: James

James — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:32:24 +0000

Excellent tutorial, Anne-Marie. I’m curious how you got the second/third line of text in each bullet to line up beneath the first letter of the first line of text? Did you use the Command + / keyboard shortcut?

By: Christa

Christa — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:01:42 +0000

Hey thanks! I’ve had this situation before and ended up using the spacebar to make the text follow the round shape :/