September 28, 2006

Centered Tabs in InDesign

Filed Under Print |

Here’s a solution to a problem I’m sure a lot of designers run into. Imagine you are laying out document, any length or number of pages, and in the flow of text, there needs to be a 2-column list of services. For example, “We offer the following services: Service 1, Service 2, Service 3… Service 8.” There are a few ways to approach this.

One is to simply bullet the list and align it left, which leaves a large space to the right of the list. You could simply use an image to fill up the space, but in this case the client would like the services listed.

The way I’ve done it in the past (because I didn’t know better) was to delete the listed text from the text frame, make a new 2-column text frame to house the list, format it how I wanted the list to look, then simply place it into the flow of text with a text-wrap command to make the existing text flow around it.

Whew, that’s a lot of work! I’m not even going to post an example of that…I’m on deadline for another project. Enter a more elegant solution, using tabs.

I like bulleted list, but this client is an upscale retailer that finds bullets passé. They want something else, more elegant. Note that the following solution could also work with a bulleted list of services, using left-aligned tabs. But, in this case, we are going to center each column, with no bullets.

First, I place two list items side by side in the flow of text, so I have four lines with 2 services on each line.

Picture 1.png

Next highlight the four lines that will make your columns. Opening up the tabs bar (shift-command-t) place two centered tabs (the straight up and down arrow, second from the left) about where you want them to be.

Picture 2.png

Then tab the list items, shift the centered tab arrows in the tab bar to get your colums just right, and you are done.

Picture 3.png

Picture 4.png

There will of course be many times when this won’t work. In my example, the list items were short enough to all be contained on one line. If one of them were to break to another line, it would be more difficult to format, but would not be impossible. Maybe I’ll explore that in the next post. Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps someone out in a pinch.

Jon

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