Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Tabs

Clear All the Tabs At Once

Is there anything more tedious than clearing out a mess of misplaced tab stops by dragging them off the tab ruler one by one, paragraph by paragraph? No, there isn't. QuarkXPress lets you do this really easily.

It's easy here, too, though many people overlook it: the Tabs palette has a flyout menu. Choose "Clear All" from that menu (Figure 3-20). Bang, zoom, all custom tabs are cleared. In fact, you could shift-click multiple text frames with the Type tool, open the Tabs palette and choose that command to clear out all the custom tabs in all those selected text frames. Even better, if you need to do this a lot, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to this command using Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Align the Tabs Palette to the Top of the Frame

Sometimes the Tabs palette aligns perfectly with the top of the text frame containing the paragraph I'm setting tab stops for; sometimes it doesn't. What am I doing wrong?

Scroll the page down or reduce the view scale until there's at least a half-inch or so of room between the top edge of the text frame and the horizontal ruler. If the Tabs palette is open but sitting elsewhere on the screen, click the little picture of the Magnet (no, it's not a horse shoe) in the right corner of the palette, and it will reposition itself to snap to the top of the frame.

Remember it's not that critical to keep the Tabs palette aligned with the frame in InDesign. Regardless of where the palette happens to be located, dragging a tab stop within it will still produce a vertical tab guide in the active frame, even if the frame's on the other side of the spread.

TIP

Did you know that you don't need to set a tab stop to create hanging indents? You still need to enter a tab character between a bullet and the first line of text, but you don't need to open the Tabs palette to set the stop. InDesign assumes you want the tab stop to equal the left paragraph indent, and inserts a "ghost" tab stop there for you automatically. It adjusts the spectral tab stop dynamically as you adjust the indents, too! Of course, if you use InDesign CS2's automatic numbering and bullets feature, then you don't have to worry about tabs or tab stops.

Giving Right-Aligned Tabs a Leader

I love the right indent tab (Shift-Tab)! It's like a tab stop is placed at the paragraph's right margin and when the margin changes (such as when the text frame gets wider), the tab adjusts auto