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bschaefer6
Inspiring
October 7, 2022
Answered

What does the blue symbol mean and how is this entire black line one character?

  • October 7, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 1268 views

Working on a form that someone else designed and wondering what this double carrot blue symbol means and also how this black line is one single character—when I hit backspace at the end of the line it deletes the entire line.

Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

The blue symbol (called a pilcrow, a fairly useless piece of information) indicates the end of a paragraph.

 

The line is formed with a tab. The tab is set to some far right position, usually a margin, and assigned a leader character, which can be dots (as for a TOC between the entry and the page number) or, as here, an underline. That makes it flexible as the text on the left varies.

 

I suggest a few basic training courses or video might help you grasp these and other very basic elements of using InDesign (which are similar to most other programs of this kind).

 

3 replies

Community Expert
October 8, 2022

If these invisible characters are bothering you or creating confusions you can switch their visibility off using the menu option

Type>Hide Hidden Characters

For more details see the following link, look at the "View hidden (nonprinting) characters" section

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/indesign/using/editing-text.html

-Manan
Peter Spier
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 7, 2022

The double carret symbol is the tab character invisible character glyph.

James may be correct about the tab leader, but it could also be an underline applied to the tab, which is my preferred method for drawing lines for information to be filled in on a form.

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
October 7, 2022

The blue symbol (called a pilcrow, a fairly useless piece of information) indicates the end of a paragraph.

 

The line is formed with a tab. The tab is set to some far right position, usually a margin, and assigned a leader character, which can be dots (as for a TOC between the entry and the page number) or, as here, an underline. That makes it flexible as the text on the left varies.

 

I suggest a few basic training courses or video might help you grasp these and other very basic elements of using InDesign (which are similar to most other programs of this kind).