Adding Bullets and Formatting Lists


Unlike many word processors, InDesign does not have a "bullet me" feature. You can't just highlight paragraphs and add bullets or numbers . You have to type a bullet character or numeral at the beginning of each paragraph and insert spaces or tabs to offset the text. The good thing about this is you have complete control over the bullet or numeral's font, color , size , and placement. And once you set up the formatting, you can automate it with both paragraph and character style sheets.

Note ‚  

You apply spacing to lists using tabs and indents ‚ paragraph formats ‚ so you'll want to make sure each bulleted or numbered item is followed by a paragraph return. (Choose Type Show Hidden Characters or press Option+ z +I or Ctrl+Alt+I to confirm the existence of paragraph returns, which are indicated with the ‚ symbol.) If bullets or numerals exist in the text, look for a single tab character between the bullet or numeral and the following text. This lets you adjust only one tab stop. If you need to strip out extra tabs or change line breaks to paragraph returns, use the Find/Change dialog box (Edit Find/Change, or z +F or Ctrl+F).

Adding bullets or numerals

Chances are, you're not writing in InDesign. The text was delivered in the form of a word processing file, and the writer or editor made some decisions about bullets or numerals. A lot of times, writers will simply enter an asterisk followed by a space to indicate a bullet. Or maybe an editor typed a numeral followed by a parenthesis in front of each step. Other times, writers or editors might use their word processor's automatic bullet or numbering feature. In many cases, you'll need to repair the bullets or numerals in the text using the Find/Change dialog box (Edit Find/Change, or z +F or Ctrl+F). The way you enter a bullet or numeral depends on what you started with:

  • If the writer or editor typed numerals or used an automatic numbering feature, the numbers and their punctuation arrive in InDesign intact. However, you might want to change or even remove the punctuation following the numeral. The look of the numerals is more of a design decision than an editorial decision. If numerals are in a different typeface and/or in a different color, a period following the numeral might just look cluttered. Using Find/Change on a text selection, you can easily change or remove punctuation in numbered lists.

  • InDesign doesn't seem to like word processors' automatic bullets, converting them to characters in the current font, which will need to be changed to bullets. Or, rather than using automatic bullets, the writer might have typed in asterisks , hyphens, or another character to indicate bullets. Once you determine what characters indicates bullets in your text, use Find/Change to change it to the bullet character you want. For example, you can search for an asterisk and change it to an n in the Zapf Dingbats font, which looks like a square n .

  • If you're writing in InDesign, you can enter numerals and bullets as you type. If you're editing and decide to add bullets or numerals to existing paragraphs, you can paste completely formatted bullets followed by tabs or spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. You can also paste a numeral, then edit the numeral's value as appropriate.

While you're adding bullet characters, decide on the font you're going to use. You can press Option+8 or Alt+8 for a simple, round en bullet ( ‚ ) in the same typeface as the body text. You can choose a different character in the body text font, or pick a character in a symbol font such as Zapf Dingbats or Wingdings. Choose Type Glyphs to see all the possibilities within a font, as explained in Chapter 41. For a list of common symbols, choose Type Insert Special Character.

New Feature ‚  

Choosing Type Glyphs is a revised menu option for what had been Type Insert Glyphs in the previous version of InDesign.

Deciding on initial formatting for bullets and numerals

Once your lists include bullets or numerals, use the Character pane (Window Type & Tables Character, or Option+ z +T or Ctrl+Alt+T) to experiment with the formatting of a bullet or numeral. For example, change the typeface of a numeral and increase the size slightly or horizontally scale the symbol used for a bullet. You can also apply a color to the stroke (outlines) or fill (inside) of the bullets or numbers; see the "Applying Color to Text" section later in this chapter.

Adding space between bullets or numerals

In addition to the formatting of bullets and numerals, you need to decide how text will follow them. Figure 19-3 shows three different options for bullets. The first column shows an en bullet followed by a tab; the second column shows an en bullet followed by a tab and a hanging indent; the third column shows a Zapf Dingbats sideways heart used as a bullet followed by a tab and hanging indent. Figure 19-4 shows a typical example, from a brochure.


Figure 19-3: These three columns show the evolution of an en bullet to a fancy bullet followed by a hanging indent. In this case, the writer typed an en bullet followed by a tab in front of each paragraph in Microsoft Word (avoiding the Bullets and Numbering feature). The designer flowed in the text, formatted it, and repositioned the tab. In the second column, the designer specified a hanging indent. The designer then decided to choose a different character for the bullet, so she highlighted the text and used Find/Change to change en bullets to a sideways heart shape in Zapf Dingbats font.

Figure 19-4: This brochure uses red diamonds as its bullets, separated from the text with a tab for consistent alignment.
Bullet character options

Although you may not know what they're called, you're used to seeing en bullets, the small round bullet ( ‚ ) included in most typefaces . But you're not limited to using this character. You can use any character in the body text font, or you can switch to a symbol or pi font and choose a more decorative character.

Zapf Dingbats and Wingdings are the most common symbol fonts, offering an array of boxes, arrows, crosses, stars, and check marks. These can be cute and effective, but cute isn't always a good thing. If you opt for a different bullet character, make sure you have a reason and that it works well with the rest of the design. Check mark bullets in an election flyer might make sense; square bullets in a to-do list for a wedding caterer might not make sense.

Note that you might want to reduce the size of the symbol slightly and that you might need to use different spacing values than you would use with an en bullet.

Don't limit yourself to these two common fonts either. You can purchase many different symbol fonts to support different content. For example, you might see leaf-shaped bullets in an herb article and paw-print bullets in a pet training article. To use your own drawing or a logotype as a bullet, convert the drawing to a font using a utility such as Macromedia Fontographer and Pyrus FontLab (see the companion Web site www.INDDcentral.com for links to these and other font utilities).

 

The most consistent way to space a bulleted or numbered list is to separate the bullet or numeral from the text with a single tab as shown in Figure 19-4. You can then create a hanging indent as described earlier in this chapter, and you can indent the paragraphs from the left and/or right as you wish.

Applying style sheets for numbered and bulleted lists

The combination of paragraph and character formats necessary to produce numbered and bulleted lists can be tedious to apply. You'll want to save the basic formatting as a paragraph style sheet. If the bullets or numerals have different formatting, save that as a character style sheet. Make sure to specify keyboard commands for the style sheets so you can apply them quickly (see Chapter 20).

To apply the style sheets to existing text, first highlight all the paragraphs, then apply the paragraph style sheet. Then you can highlight each numeral or bullet and apply the character style sheet. With bullets, you can use Find/Change to locate all the bullets and apply the character style sheet.

New Feature ‚  

The new Nested Styles feature lets you have the paragraph style automatically apply a character style to a user -specified range of text. Chapter 20 covers this in more depth.

With a nested style, you can automate this formatting. For example, you could have a paragraph style named Bullet that applies a character style named Bullet to the first character of the paragraph (for example, to apply the Zapf Dingbats font, which, if the first character in the paragraph is an n, results in a solid square bullet).

Caution ‚  

If you're not using nested styles, make sure to apply the paragraph style sheet first, and the character style sheet second, or the paragraph formatting will wipe out your special numeral or bullet formatting.




Adobe InDesign CS Bible
Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible
ISBN: 0470119381
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 344
Authors: Galen Gruman

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net