Tip of the Week: Alternative Uses for Numbered Lists
This InDesign tip on alternative uses for numbered lists was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on November 3, 2016.
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There’s no need to limit InDesign’s Numbered List feature to inserting numbers before text paragraphs. For example, perhaps you would like to have the word “TIP” followed by a colon in front of certain paragraphs. The easy way to do this is to define a numbered list by choosing a paragraph style and, in the Paragraph Styles panel, clicking on the flyout menu and mousing down to Paragraph Style Options. In the resulting Paragraph Style Options window, select the Bullets and Numbering option in the left-hand pane.
In the right-hand pane, set the List type as Numbers and leave the Format option set as None. But then, in the field for Number, enter the word TIP followed by the code for a tab (^t). You can even apply a character style to this non-numbered list.
There are two big benefits to this process:
1. You don’t have to type the word TIP and insert a tab character.
2. If your client decides to change the word “TIP” to “NOTE”, you simply change the style definition, and the word will change everywhere that style is applied.
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That’s a great tip. Do you have one for using a style to similarly insert text at the end of a paragraph? I seem to recall a way to do that in Framemaker, but I’ve yet to come across one of InDesign.
Michael: You can kind of do it, if it’s just a one-line paragraph: https://creativepro.com/numbering-paragraphs-side.php
It’s a trick that uses the foreign language paragraph composer for languages that read right to left.
But it has to be a one-line paragraph that doesn’t have any punctuation such as periods, question marks, or even parenthesis at the end of it.
I have not found it useful.