From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Applying formatting to a paragraph - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Applying formatting to a paragraph

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- [Instructor] We've already talked about formatting that you can apply to individual characters, such as kerning or underline. Now let's get into formatting that you apply to a whole paragraph. First, let's zoom in on this text on the right side of the page by holding down Command + space bar or Control + space bar in Windows and then dragging to the right. Now, I'll double click on this heading to place my type cursor in it. You may notice that I did not select the entire paragraph. I just have the cursor flashing in there. That's all you need when you apply paragraph formatting. Of course, that's very different than character formatting, where you do need to select the characters that you want to change. Okay, up here at the top of my screen, you'll see that the Control panel is currently set to Character Formatting. That's the little button that has an A in it. So let's click the paragraph symbol and that switches to Paragraph Formatting. I should point out that technically when you switch from one mode to the other, you're really just switching which features are on the left side of this panel, because if your screen is wide enough, you can see both the Paragraph and Character Formatting in the Control panel. Those buttons just change which ones are on the left. Okay, Paragraph Formatting. Now the most basic paragraph formatting is the horizontal alignment. Right now, this is set to left align. That is the left edge of the text is at the left margin of the text frame, but we can change this by clicking on one of those buttons in the Control panel. For example, here's centered or here's right aligned. Let's go ahead and select a bunch of text over here. I'll simply drag over the text, and again, I'm not selecting the whole paragraphs, but that's okay. Let's change this to justify text. Justify makes the text even down the left and right margins. That looks good. Now I'm going to click in just this last paragraph here and change its indent. That's this field over here, the left indent. Right now it's at a zero, but let's make it bigger, maybe 16 points. When I press Return or Enter, you can see the entire paragraph is indented from the margin. Now, I don't actually want to do that, so I'm going to undo that and instead what I want is to indent just the first line. That's the second field down here. Let's change that to 16 points. When I hit Return or Enter, you can see that now just the first line is indented. When you're trying to indent your first line, you should definitely use this feature. Don't type a tab at the beginning or a bunch of spaces or something silly like that. Use InDesign the way it's meant to be used. Use First Line Indent. Also, if you don't want InDesign to hyphenate your text, you can turn that on and off for a whole paragraph with this checkbox up here in the Control panel, I click once and now no more hyphens. Okay, let's add a little space before this heading, and I know it's tempting to just type a blank line between the two paragraphs, but there is an unwritten rule that says, if you can help it, never type the same invisible character twice. That means you should not type two spaces in a row or two paragraph returns in a row, or even two tabs in a row. So if you're not supposed to add a blank line, then what should you do? In this case, I'll select the paragraph, or just place your cursor in it, and change the space before and after fields. That's these fields up here. Let's change the space before to 10 points, and to give it a little more space, let's put four points after it. That looks much better. So alignment, indent, spacing. These are all just the beginning. In the next few movies, we're going to be looking at spanning text across columns, creating drop caps, tabs, and far more text formatting.

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