Change bullet size in document

[cindyh23311374]

I have a document with hundreds of bullets separating short phrases. The phrases are assigned a paragraph style, but not the bullets. I now wish to change the bullet size. Using find/change didn't work. I tried entering "•" and also "^8" in the find field, enter the current font size (12.5pt) in find format and 10pt in change format and and it kept telling me "no replacements made" or "not found." What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Create a character style for the bullets. Assign it the font, size, color and other characteristics you want for just the bullet, not the content text. (Pro tip: if you diddle around with different characters and fonts, some adjustment of size and baseline shift will often make the result look better.)

In the Paragraph Style for the bullet, assign that style under "Bullets and Numbering."

In that same menu, choose the bullet character you wish to use, from any available font. (The associated glyph panel will show the base font; if you change the font with the character style, it will be remapped to that font. It's usually best to choose the glyph in the Bullets menu and not mess with the font in the style, but you can do either.)

That should give you complete control of the bullet itself for that Paragraph Style. The content text — color, font, spacing, etc. — will remain controlled by the rest of that style.

Further pro tip: the bullets will change with tweaks to the Character Style if you have Preview checked there — very useful for fine-tuning and trying weird stuff. 🙂

[cindyh23311374]

Does it mean I have to assign/apply the character style individually hundreds of times before I can modify the style? The phrases are not actual bullets, but set up like this:

"phrase number one • phrase number two • phrase number three…" inside a paragraph.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Nope, see below. I misread your actual need.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

And, okay, on re-reading your post, that standard answer may not be on target. If the "bullets" you are referring to are just inline characters, you can only change them with the find/change process you're already using.

I would create a Character Style for them, and assign it using Find/Replace. Set F/R to "GREP."

For 'Find," cut and paste one bullet into the field, so that there's no guessing which glyph might be in play. (If appropriate, set Find to "BODY" text or whatever Paragraph Style holds this text, to limit it to that text alone.} (The standard code for a round bullet is ^8, by the way, and in GREP, it's ~8.)

In Replace, you can paste the bullet again, or use the "Found Text" code, $0. (The latter will put the same character in; you could also substitute another character if you like.) Click the T/magnifier icon and set it to the new Bullet character style.

Run Change All. All of your inline bullets will now be assigned the Character Style, and you should be able to tweak it to your heart's content. (Pro tip: make it bright magenta or such, and review to make sure all the bullets are so tagged. Manually tag or fix any that got missed, for whatever reason. Then set the Character Style color to whatever it should be.)

[cindyh23311374]

Awesome, following the directions, I did it! THANK YOU, and especially when there were thousands of these dots, not hundreds. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

GREP is your very best buddy for this stuff. Spend a little time with the options (like the various search/character glyphs) and how you can remap one style to another, selectively. Very, very powerful "fix-it" feature. 🙂

[cindyh23311374]

I see that now, the word GREP just sounds so scary :). Thank you again.

[Peter Spier]

This could also be handled automatically with either a nested style or GREP style as part of the paragraph style so you don't need to go back anr run Find?Change every time you edit the text...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Absolutely. The "proper" approach here would have been to use a GREP style to automatically adjust all the bullets without further touch-up or manual work. (Not nested style for this example, I think — it needs to run through every instance in a paragraph, not just some arbitrary number of characters at the beginning, which seems to be the limitation of nested styles.)

But one step at a time, for a user who thinks "GREP" is scary-looking. 🙂

[Peter Spier]

Nested style can work -- none up to one bullet, then the style through 1 bullet. Repeat as may times as the maximum number of bullets you are likely to have in a paragraph. A bit unwieldy to set up, but probably less overhead than the GREP style.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I can't find any way to make a nested style work — the entire concept is "do [this] through/to [some marker character]". The list of marker characters is fixed. If there's a way to use a bullet as that marker, I am unable to find it. At best, it seems you'd have to assume the bullets are bracketed with en- or em-spaces:

Whereas a GREP style requires only this:

...and done.

I'm not experienced with either trick, though. Am I missing something?

[Peter Spier]

Just as you can type or paste a character into the Find/Change dialog you can do the same in the Nested Styles trigger field. Here I used a pasted Bullet glyph, but you can also run the style through 1 character instead of one •

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, thanks for that. I figured that must be it but I fiddled with the field and menu for some time without establishing that option. (There's no particularly good indication that the field is selectable for input; a second level of "just having to know.")

I can see this method being ideal for some styling, but I'll maintain that the GREP style is the simpler and more efficient one—the appropriate choice—for the OP's need and most "running character" content like this. I'd reserve Inline Styles for more complex patterned formatting, such as bolding the first words or first line of a paragraph.

But: lots of tools, lots of ways to use them. Wouldn't have that any other way.

[Peter Spier]

I would tend to agree about using the GREP over Nested style in this case if there are not a lot of other GREP styles in play.

Something else in the "need to know" vein of entering text into the fields of Nested styles: if you type "cat" (without the quotes) thinking the word cat will be the trigger you are in for a big surprise. The style will triger with the first instance of c, a, or t encountered. Voice of experience speaking here.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's absolutely from left field, but that reminds me of the old Unix joke. If you enter —

> cat "food in cans"

the system will obediently respond —

cat: cannot open food in cans

I'll sneak away now. 🙂

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Remember, however, you may have to alter your approach for different fonts, as the tyepface's designer decides on the size of the bullet character THEY want in their font, so some may be much larger or smaller than you want or expect.

One additional suggestion: if you want to keep bullets consistent across a range of typefaces, you could use your Character Style to define a specific one that you like.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I touched on that with the suggestions to adjust font size and baseline shift.

There isn't, IMHO, much value in swapping one font's bullet for another; the vast majority of faces seem to use exactly the same glyph, allowing a bit for weight and vertical positioning. Some fonts use weird glyphs like an oval smear or a bullet so finely drawn it's nearly invisible at text sizes. But for "plain bullet" use I rarely do more than, say, swap it to a normal weight to keep it from being too heavy in bold text, or to bold to give it more heft in a very finely-drawn font.

The technique is more useful when swapping in a completely different glyph — square, diamond, Minion ornament, etc. and in those cases some size/position/weight adjustment almost always helps get a more balanced result.

ETA: Also worth keeping in mind that most fonts have two bullet characters: the standard, proportional-to-a-bit-heavy one that can be inserted using Alt-0149 or any of the standard 'bullet' codes, and a (usually) much finer one, inserted with Alt-0183 and often called "middot." Useful for swapping one way or the other without a second face or font.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

All that I know, yes. I just presented it as an option, especially when changing font size and baseline shift can mess up line spacing in some cases, especially if one is using [shudder-ew-ick] Auto line spacing.

You do you!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I know you know this. Sometimes hard to target responses to the OP or other 'learners' who might read the thread. 🙂