From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Setting tabs and tab stops - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Setting tabs and tab stops

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- [Instructor] We are in our long document file from the Exercise Files folder, and we're going to jump to a previous spread by pressing Option or Alt + Page Up a couple of times. Now, let's select this text frame on the left-hand page and zoom in by pressing Command + Plus or Control + Plus couple of times. Now, I've placed tabs in this story to separate the text from the numbers, but you can't see the tab characters. And of course you can't because tabs are invisible, right? But we can see them if we go to the Type menu and choose way down here at the very bottom, Show Hidden Characters. I love this feature because it shows me all the invisible characters in my document, like the end of story marker, or the end of paragraph marker, or here between the text and the number, you'll see a little double angle bracket. That's the symbol for a tab character. By the way, these invisible characters are blue right now, just like the frame edge, because my text frame is on the blue layer. I often like working with these hidden characters turned on because it shows exactly what's in my text frame. And that is especially true when I'm working with tabs because I need to know where those tabs are to set them up right. Now, there's a problem here I need to fix. The numbers don't line up, and that's because tabs, by default, always go to the nearest tab stop. And tab stops, by default, are set up every 1/2 inch across the text frame. Now, you might be tempted to come in here and start typing additional tabs, but don't do it. You only want one tab at a time. Instead, what you want to do is set up your own tab stop. To do that, the first thing you need to do is select all the paragraphs that you want to affect. So I'll double-click to switch to the type tool and select pretty much the entire table of contents. If possible, you want to make sure you have some space above the text frame when you're working with tabs. So I'm going to pan down here just a little bit by Option + Spacebar + Dragging or Alt + Spacebar + Dragging. You don't technically need to do that, but I find it's useful. The Tab panel automatically snaps to the top of the text frame. It can't do that if there's not enough space. So instead it just kind of floats around on the page, which works too, but it's awkward. Now, to add my first tab stop, all I need to do is click in this blank area above the ruler. Then, if you want to move it, just drag it. You'll notice that as I'm dragging, you can see a black line that indicates exactly where the tab stop is going to be, exactly where those numbers are going to align to. So this is okay, but I'd like to make these numbers line up along their right edges. So I'm going to change the type of tab stop. While it's selected in the Tabs panel, you can see it's selected because it's kind of highlighted in blue. I'm going to come over here and choose the right justified tab stop. When you do that, it makes the text flush right at that point. So that looks better. All right, I'm going to click out here and then head up to the type menu and turn off my hidden characters. I don't need those anymore. So the only problem now that I'm seeing is that the space is really big. The space from the text to the number. It would be helpful to have some dots in there. Something to lead my eye from one side to the other. And of course, the key word there is lead. What we want is a tab leader. So let's select those paragraphs one more time. I'll head back up to the Tabs panel and I want to make sure that my tab stop is still selected. You can type any character you want in the leader field right here, and it'll repeat it over and over again. So in this case, I'm just going to press a dot or a period and then I'll hit Return or Enter. You can see that those dots fill in all the spaces. It's easier to see if we deselect this. Oh, by the way, I should point out that you can select a tab just like any other character, just kind of drag over it. And now, you can format that later. I'm going to zoom in a little more with a Command + Plus or Control + Plus, and let's head up to the Control Panel, change this to character formatting mode, and I'm going to make this much smaller. Maybe nine points. Let's spread those dots out by changing the tracking. Let's make this really big, like 200. If I click off here, you can see this is just a more elegant look. Now, if I wanted to apply this to all the tabs, you'd probably want to make that into a character style, which I talk about in the next chapter. But for now, I just want to end by saying tabs and tab stops aren't hard, but they do take some getting used to. Take a little time to practice making tab stops in your documents. And remember, don't type two tabs in a row.

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