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Dan Greyhound
Dan Greyhound
Inspiring
November 25, 2022
Answered

Invalid indent value bug

  • November 25, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 2711 views

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.

 

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Correct answer Dan Greyhound

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.

1 reply

Dan Greyhound
Dan GreyhoundAuthor
Inspiring
November 25, 2022

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

Dan Greyhound
Dan GreyhoundAuthorCorrect answer
Inspiring
November 25, 2022

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
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    November 25, 2022

    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.

     

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