inDesign Tip #14 Using leaders and aligniment options for tabs

What we are accomplishing: Using the leader and alignment options located in the tabs palette to allow you to do advanced editing with text.

When working in inDesign, certain tasks may call for special formatting of tabs.  For this example, let’s say that you have a table of contents that  contains a list of chapters with a corresponding page number that appears on the opposite side of the page.  You will probably want to do 2 things.  One,  you need to have a dotted line that will go across the page to connect the page number to the chapter title. Two, the page numbers should be aligned so that a word or character (in this example I will use BOOK 2) is always aligned so that page numbers extend to the left when they become larger.  Now, there are plenty of ways to accomplish both of these feats.  However, using the tools provided within the tabs palette will save a lot of time and frustration.  To begin, you will need to open your tabs palette.  Go to Type > Tabs to open this palette.  Once open, you will be able to set your tabs to the desired positions.  For now, place a “Center Justified Tab” in the area that you want the page number to be.  Now that this tab is here, make sure that you select it and that the tab appears to be highlighted.  With the tab selected, fill in the “Leader:” box with the character that you would like to repeat (in this case, using a ° to circle to create a line of dots) and press enter.  Now you should have dotted line of characters.  If you need to make further adjustments to the dotted line, you can format the “tab” character as if it were typed text.  Now then, to change the tabs behavior to react to the word BOOK, select the center tab that you created previously.  With the tab selected, change the tab itself to the “Align to Decimal” tab type located on the right of the tab selections.  Next, select the “Align On:” located to the right of the “Leader” box.  Here, you can enter in the word BOOK to make it recognize those characters.  Voila!  Now when you type to the left of the word BOOK, the text will continue to flow to the left.