InDesign Typographer Quotes, Bulleted Lists & Dot Leaders

A few quick tips for common tasks

Designers and Desktop Publishers perform many typographical tasks while designing. Typography used to be handled by specialists who did nothing else, but in modern times, with applications that are always in development, typographical tasks have become easier and can be done with the same equipment and software used to produce layouts—designers have to know the basics of typography as no one else is taking care of that for them now. This tutorial will cover three amongst the most common typographical tasks as they are handled with InDesign CS & CS2: the use of typographer, proper, quotes, bulleted lists and dot leaders.

Use Typographer Quotes

A common mistake is to use primers instead of curly quotes and apostrophes. When using quotation marks or apostrophes, the correct characters to use are those curly quotes also known as “typographer quotes” instead of the straight primers. The illustration shows which ones are the correct charactes to be used as typographer quotes ans which ones aren’t.

Figure 1: Use typographer (curly) quotes

To use typographer’s quotes in InDesign go to InDesign > Preferences > Text (for Mac) or Edit > Preferences > Text (for Windows). Once the Preferences window opens, check the option Use Typographer’s Quotes.

Dot Leaders

Here is a very useful article about dot leaders from About Desktop Publishing Guide, Jacci Howard Bear. If you don’t know what dot leaders are it is good idea to read it: Using Leader Tabs or Dot Leaders.

Dot leaders in InDesign CS and CS2 are set up from the Tabs palette (Window > Type & Tables > Tabs). InDesign actually allows you to use more than just dots as leaders. You can choose any character to be your leaders in actual fact.

Figure 2: The Tabs palette

Select a text frame with the type tool. Back to the Tabs palette, type a period in the Leader field. On the right hand side you should have 4 different arrows. Click on the 3rd one. Now click anywhere just above the ruler. You will see that the field X has now a number. That’s how long your tab leader, i.e. a tab containing leaders, will be. You can type a different value in the X field if you are not happy with what you have. Now type a word and press tab. Your leaders will show up and they will go as far as you set your X value in the Tabs palette. Now type another word. You will see that the second word is right justified. To have a different type of justification you just need to click on any of the other arrows that I mentioned at the beginning. I let you discover what they do.

Making Bulleted Lists

Here is another article from Jacci Howard Bear this time on bulleted lists:

• Bite the Bullets
  A few “bullets dos and don’ts”.
• Eliminate Excess Spacing in Lists
  Stop Using the Default Tab and Bullet Settings.

The only way to make automated bullet lists with InDesign CS is purchasing the Pagemaker plug-in pack, i.e., InDesign CS Pagemaker edition. With the normal version of InDesign this has to be done manually, i.e, you need to use a dingbat font to get a bullet or whatever symbol you want to use for the bulleted list, and then adjust indent and spacing manually. Style Sheets can be used to at least partially automate the bulleted lists. InDesign CS2, however, has an automated function for bulleted lists. We’ll explore the methods of making bulleted lists both in InDesign CS and InDesign CS2.

To make a bulleted list with InDesign CS:

• Open the Paragraph Styles palette.
• Go to the Tabs category.
• You will find that it looks like the Tabs palette. Following the instructions earlier on in this article, set your tab size and use a bullet as a leader instead of a period. Of course the tab has to be big enough to accomodate the bullet but small enough so that only one bullet shows. Press OK.
• Every time you type a tab, the bullet will appear. Press return whenever you want to go to the next line and press a tab again to get a new bullet.

To make a bulleted list with InDesign CS2:

• InDesign CS2 has an additional category in the Paragraph Styles palette called Bullets and Numbering. Guess where you will be clicking…
• In List Type choose whether you want a bulleted list or a numeric list.

When choosing bulleted list, InDesign CS2 will present you with the options in Figure 3. Here you can choose what type of bullet to use (you can also add to the default list), colour, size font and so on.

Figure 3

When choosing the numbered list, InDesign CS2 will present you with the the options in Figure 4. In addition to the basic formatting options such as font, size, colour and so on, you can choose what type of numbering and separator to use.

Figure 4

You can set the distance between the bullets and the text in the Tab category, of the Paragraph Styles palette.

See also:
InDesign Tutorial: Add Style and Save Time with Paragraph Style Sheets

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