e.g. http://designicu.com/pub/temp/figures.jpg

Every year I align these negative figures by hand. Surely there’s a better way…?

What I seem to need is a special character—something like the Right Indent Tab—but which says, “Keep this all in the same column only, in terms of right-tab aligning, just ignore everything after the special character.”

It’ll look something like this:
_______________________
Item ________________

Tried kerning the right aligned tab with some success but not perfectly aligned.
So my hack is to add a right indent to the paragraph rule.

Since I’m accustomed to pressing the Tab key with my left hand, F2 is close by and works like the Tab does.

Excellent series Mr. Burke, I followed with great interest. I think it’s great the things you can do with tabs.

Now how can I stop people sending me files with 10 tabs per line for one item???

It’s unfortunate that when you apply gradients to text it factors in the entire text frame and not just the selected text.

In InDesign CS2 and CS3, you can apply gradient fills (and strokes!) to selected text. Just highlight some text with the Type tool and apply the gradient (or a gradient swatch). Just make sure that, on the Swatches or Color panel/palette, the text fill rather than the frame fill is selected.

In other words, to achieve the faded underline effect in your last example, using the same colour (not different colours for each line) you would have to customize the colour stops for each line factoring in the position and length of the text, correct?

Ohhh! I understand what you mean. (I’ll leave the first response anyway for those who may be confused about that.) What you mean is, horizontally, a left-to-right gradient applies to the entire line of text. Yeah, unfortunately, it does. You can see that in Fig. 5, the second to last image with the white-cyan gradient. In that case, what I did was apply the same gradient to the tab stops.

Now, in the last example, I did something a little different. There are actually 4 tabstops in play there in the following configuration:

 1>> Oranges 2>> 3>> $1.99 lb 4>>

All four have a dot leader (actually space then dot), and all the dot leaders are colored with a color to white gradient. The background gradient is a thick underline with a negative offset; the underline is set to the text color, so it picks up the leader gradients. I created 1 character style and four gradient swatches. After inserting the tabs and setting the stops, I highlighted all the tab spaces and applied the single character style, which made all the dot leaders and underlines yellow to white gradients. I did this for all lines, manually overriding the yellow-white gradient with orange-white, purple-white, and red-white with my prepared swatches. In order to get the fade-in and fade-out effect, I reversed the gradients on tabstops 2 and 4–just highlight the tab spaces and click the Reverse button on the Gradient panel/palette.

Naturally, if I were doing more than these four I would have created separate character styles to change the colors and/or directions, and all based on a parent character style.

That reminds me, is there anyway to incorporate an edit or delete button for our posts. For those that don’t proof read before clicking on submit.

I’ll look into it.

On the Mac, you can just press Option-Tab to insert a tab inside a table cell.

On a PC, Alt-Tab is reserved for flipping through your open programs. However, that doesn’t mean you need to go to the Insert menu all the time (or copy/paste). Just go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. It’s listed under the Type Menu product area; look for Insert Special Character > Other > Tab.

On a PC you’ll see that “Tab” is already set as the default keyboard shortcut for this but only while in a Text frame (it says “Context: Text”. If you choose “Table” from the Context menu, you can add another keyboard shortcut for this command. I use Control-Tab.

In other words, when I want to add a tab inside a cell in Windows, I press Control-Tab. Works great.

“…with the exception of CELLS…”

That reminds me, is there anyway to incorporate an edit or delete button for our posts. For those that don’t proof read before clicking on submit.

Casey