How to create hanging Indent in InDesign?

[landscape_snarkitect]

How do you create hanging indents in Indesign?

I am creating a references page that include MLA citatioins. I created the citations in Word, but when I copy the content over, it does not understand the formatting. Is there an easy/ fast way to do this, or for it to recognized italicised text? I will be utimatley changing the font but was hoping there is an easier way to do it than manually change everything.

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[Peter Spier]

In your paragraph style set a left indent, the na negative value for first line indent (and you must do it in that order).

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You set the left indent of the paragraph, then "negative indent" the first line:

As Peter notes, you have to do it in that order. If you try to set an 'outdent' greater than the paragraph indent, ID will give you an error popup.

You should be doing this by assigning Paragraph styles to all the content, in this case, one called "Citations" or some such. Then all changes are applied to all tagged paragraphs, rather than having to do it one at a time or manually, as is unfortunately common in Word.

[pixxxelschubser]

… I will be utimatley changing the font but was hoping there is an easier way to do it than manually change everything.

By @landscape_snarkitect

Many smart people say it over and over again:
"Never work in InDesign without paragraph and character styles!"

Therefore:

1. Create a paragraph style,
2. apply it to your citatioins
3. and change your settings as needed only in the paragraph format.

Good luck and have fun
😉

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I think most people who come to ID do so through an apprenticeship in Word, which so actively disparages style use that (1) there are "pro user" books that all but giggle at the notion of styles and (2), as I am discovering to my dismay this week, the web version of Word 365 all but makes style use and management impossible.

But yes — it's more than "smart people say," it's that proper use of InDesign simply does not allow Word-style hack'n'slash fingerpainting of format. I wish there was a way to really drill that into all newcomers... 🙂

[Joel Cherney]

but when I copy the content over, it does not understand the formatting. Is there an easy/ fast way to do this, or for it to recognized italicised text? 

I think that the easier way would be to place your Word doc, instead of copying and pasting. That's "Place" in the File menu. That drops your entire Word document into your InDesign document, with formatting (usually) intact.

By default, InDesign treats clipboard contens as plain text (so when you copy and paste, you're really only pasting the text itself into the InDesign format, which is also why your italics are disappearing). There is a setting in the preferences that you can change to allow "rich text" copying and pasting from Word. It's in the "Clipboard Handling" section of "Preferences", under the Edit menu. 

[HARSHIKA_VERMA]

Hi @landscape_snarkitect,

Hope you're doing well!

We would like to follow up on your request raised. Are you able to create hanging indents by following our experts advice? Please feel free to update the discussion if you need further assistance from us.

We would be happy to help.

Thanks,

Harshika