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. |
Figure 3-20 A fast way to get rid of all the tab stops in a paragraph is to choose the Clear All command from the Tabs palette menu.
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.
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 automatically. But there's one problem: I can't figure out how to get a tab leader (like dots) to fill the tab space. |
Unfortunately, InDesign CS cannot apply tab leaders to right indent tabs. But InDesign CS2 can! The trick is that the right indent tab always uses the tab leader from the last tab stop in the paragraph. Just add a tab stop with a leader character and the leader appears in the space created by the Shift-tab. |