Any workaround to numbers & bullets hijacking tabs and hanging indents?

[Thomas_Calvin]

It appears that bullets and numbers have been implemented by hijacking tabs and indents. As far as I can tell, this makes it impossible to do a hanging indent as you see fit.

So now, to get lines of text after the first one to show up with a hanging indent, I have to put a hard return at the end of the first line and create a whole other style for subsequent lines. Lame, to say the least. Am I overlooking some other option? And no... tables are not an option for us.

In this screen grab, the examples at the top show what the text needs to look like. The underline is created by a tab with a leading _ character. The apparent hanging indent is accomplished with the hard returns.  The one I'm working on shows why:

[Joel Cherney]

I don't think the hanging indent should function as a tab stop on the first line, because it's expressly supposed to dictate what happens after the first line.

Well, that makes intuitive sense to me, but I took a quick poll of every tool I currently have installed for handling text formatting with a visual clicky interface (not that many, outside of Adobe and MS products!) and they all treat the hanging indent as a tab stop. I don't think that this is unique to InDesign; it's more a convention of the page-layout genre. 

And in fact you can add a leader to the hanging indent; it just doesn't do anything.

It doesn't stick, either:

Probably someone writing code for this app (in, what, 1999?) ought to have greyed out the Leader: field when a non-tab marker was selected, as the contents of the field aren't retained when applied to a non-tab marker. 

There are quite a few problems with the Tabs UI.

I've had most of the same gripes for many years. All I can offer you by way of advice is that if you try to grab the tab stops down close to the ruler, where they have a little arrow, you get 3 clickable pixels instead of just the one.  Also I used to use a script that gave me a numerical interface to use instead of the tab ruler, so I could just key in my preferred tab stop(s) and whack OK without having to deal with the tab ruler. I assume I can dig it out of the archives if you are interested at all.

(But beyond that: this thread of yours, like a lot of your contributions here, makes me wonder what app you used to use for documentation purposes, before you were induced to move to InDesign. Your list of gripes implies that you've been working with documentation for Quite Some Time - you gripe like a very experienced handler of text processing tools, like most of the regulars around here. But I can't figure out where you could have come from that would leave you with the expectations that you have.  Are you perhaps someone who is a refugee from... Arbortext? Some strain of LaTeX? Feel free to ignore me if I'm prying or being rude. It's just been making me scratch my head, every time I come across one of your threads: you have such reasonable complaints! But I can't think of a tool that wouldn't have any of these, you know, questionable UI conventions, or long-standing text handling flaws that everyone just works around.)

[Thomas_Calvin]

Hahaha, thanks for your thoughtful reply. I started my career as a technical writer at a Big-6 firm. I did a ton of programming in Word, which was such a great application in the '90s. With it and WordBasic, I automated a huge number of tedious tasks that wasted my doc team's time or just weren't yet supported in Word. I don't call myself an expert in many things... or really much at all, but I would say I was an expert in Word. Don't even ask me about it today; it's abysmal trash.

When it came time to write an entire technical architecture manual on my own, I used FrameMaker for publishing and Corel Draw for art. I learned FrameMaker pretty thoroughly and structured my documents "correctly," as I had in Word. Pretty much no ad-hoc formatting. Styles and whatnot throughout. I don't remember it pïssing me off, so it must have been OK. I do remember having a tabs problem in FrameMaker when the Pentium came out: The greater math precision of the new CPU made it impossible to put tab stops exactly where you wanted them in FrameMaker. Took me a minute to figure that out (and of course report it).

I have returned to tech writing after decades in software development. Maybe that's why I have so little patience for shoddy design and implementation... but nah, I would have been just as ornery regardless. My new team was already using InDesign. I have undertaken to learn it thoroughly so I can clean up decades of legacy documents that are highly competent in terms of content but suffer from almost no use of styles. Some have descended from OCRed typewritten docs. And many are replete with tables, tables within tables, merged cells all over the place...

And yes I have already written an InDesign plug-in to process said legacy docs!

See, I would be very patient with bugs in table-handling. Just thinking about tables makes me cringe as a programmer. But ungrabbable tab stops? No excuse.

A lot of what I'm doing now is in preparation to move into an online tool. Our market is very demanding and regulated, and we just can't manage revision-tracking reliably by hand anymore. I can't wait to get all of this stuff into a repository that's free of formatting hassles like the ones I report here.

But hey, on a positive note: I find InDesign's paragraph-numbering options pretty well thought-out! I've managed to make them work as desired in all cases so far, through quite a few levels of nesting! Woot!

Also the peeps in this forum are quick to respond and often put quite a bit of effort into replies. I appreciate that.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Yes, it turns out that there's a bug where the first tab (or its leader) will not work if the hanging indent is set to the right of the first tab stop (or possibly equal to it; not sure):

[Mike Witherell]

So what you want is the Numbered list to define the first tab position in a paragraph style. In my example, notice how the left, first, and tab position are defined:

Then, in Tabs section of the paragraph style, notice the second defined tab that makes the underscore:

This second tab has underscore characters defined in it. There are no other tabs defined in the paragraph style.

It is true that the Tabs panel is small and too fussy to aim your mouse at. Ever since PageMaker 1.2 it has been too small and fussy. And yes, the left indent (which you can shift-drag, btw) must equal the tab position, it cannot be ahead of the tab, or else it nullifies the tab. This is not a bug. To delete an existing tab, drag it downwards. I avoid using the Tabs panel by defining a paragraph style, and defining distances in the paragraph style options dialog box.