Invalid indent value bug

[Dan Greyhound]

I'm getting the error message 'invalid indent value' but it makes no sense. I made the first line indent a negative and the rest of the para a positive in order to create turnover lines in a poem. Obviously, the minus value of the first line shouldn't exceed the positive value of the paragraph, but InDesign won't allow me to do this. The positive value is 5.009mm (I'm sure it was 8mm last night!) and the negative value is 8mm: this makes no sense! And I can't change either value either way without getting the 'invalid indent value' error. I've tried resaving the file as ID template and renaming but no luck.

[Dan Greyhound]

Update: the older version saved on my computer is fine. This problem has only arisen with the version saved to the Cloud.

[Dan Greyhound · Accepted solution]

For anyone's future reference: I fixed it by adjusting the indent in the tabs palette. Set both upper and lower indents to zero and I can now use the indents on the control panel again.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This "feature" has always seemed poorly implemented to me, especially when you do something like reduce an indent to less than a first-line outdent; ID should handle these changes more gracefully instead of throwing an error message. It's just all sharp edges in there, like playing "Operation." 🙂

But I can see how some particular combination of changes might bypass the logic check and warning and leave behind a "broken" combination of an outdent larger than the indent. This seems to be what happened to you.