Tab Leaders, Drop Caps, and Hanging Punctuation in InDesign and QuarkXPress.

Basic how-to information on three tools in your typographic toolbox.

If you use them right, you aren’t using them all the time, but when you need to use them, you ought to know how. Here’s the basic skinny on three well-known but somewhat taken-for-granted typographic filips.

Tab Leaders-what are they?

The illustration shows a table from an old textbook in the author’s collection. One way to lay out a table such as this in print is to left-justify the left hand column, either right-align or align figures at along the common decimal point. The result of this is a rectangular shape that lives rather comfortably in the column of text. In order to fill what would otherwise be an awkward trapped space in the middle and to form the visual connection between the detail and the number it is to be linked to, a line of dots can be made to extend from the one to the other.

This is just another of the myriad tools of type design that are now under the power of the desktop designer. In QuarkXPress and InDesign, these are linked to tabs and are called tab leaders. Tab leaders in these applications are not just limited to dots, however, and in both are relatively easy to do.

Tab Leaders in InDesign

To get the same effect in InDesign (this should work in both CS and CS2), first we have to start with a list. We’ve taken a few items from the list in the illustration here and typed them into a text frame in InDesign CS2 and made another list of them.

Tab Leader Central Control in InDesign is found on the Tabs palette. Bringing this up now (Mac: CMD-SHIFT-T, Win: CTRL-SHIFT-T, or Menu: Window>Type & Tables>Tabs) we duplicate the original look of the table by installing a decimal-align tab to the right of the list, and then inserting a tab in each line. The numbers all get in line along the decimal points, all nice and pretty.

There’s still the matter of the dots, however. This is simple: directly between the X-postion box and the Align On box is a box labeled “Leader:”. We put a period in this box and press Return or Tab, and we got this:

Wow! That gets us the dots, alright, but they’re waaaay to close together, and the dense black color arrests our attention. Bad mojo. What’s to be done? Well, the Leader input box accepts up to eight characters for input. Instead of just a period, put a period and space in:

There. Much better.

As mentioned, the Leader box can contain up to eight characters, opening artistic possibilities for constructing lists using other characters, dingbats, or whatever. Just remember to choose appropriately for the communication you’re trying to accomplish.

Tab Leaders in QuarkXPress

The procedure is much the same in QuarkXPress, though there are differences in procedure and terminology.

After setting up the list in XPress 6.5, placing the decimal-align tab and putting the tabs in, with the text box selected, we bring up the Tabs pane of Paragraph Attributes (Mac: CMD-SHIFT-T, Win: CTRL-SHIFT-T, or Menu: Style>Tabs…). Once up, click on the tab to select it and then put the period-space combination in the box labelled “Fill Character”, then strike the Tab key.

Quark Paragraph Attribute dialog with a period-space in the Fill Character input box that produces the same effect as the Leader input box in InDesign.

To find out about drop caps in InDesign and XPress, proceed to Page 2. Hanging punctuation is covered on Page 3