October 2009 Archives

It looks like both InDesign CS3 and InDesign CS4 are compatible with Windows 7. Here's a press release I received this morning:

Adobe today confirmed that Creative Suite 4 and future versions of Creative Suite will run on Windows 7. Adobe has tested its Creative Suite 4 family of products and components on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate edition and found the performance held up to the company's high standards of quality and performance. Creative Suite 3 has also been tested and will support Windows 7 without any updates. Older versions of the software may run on Windows 7, but they have not been tested for compatibility.

Please visit www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq/ for more details.

This is another addition to the Feature Galleries series. I've provided as many types of bulleted lists and numbered lists as I can think of.

When you need to create a simple list of bulleted or numbered paragraphs, just select the paragraphs and click the Bulleted List or Numbered List button on the Control panel. Alt/Option-click the button to bring up a dialog box that lets you format the list. See the Create bulleted or numbered lists and Format a bulleted or numbered list Help topics.

You may also want to check out the Bullets and Numbering in InDesign CS3 section of the Real World InDesign CS3. (Bullets and numbering hasn't changed since CS3.)

Whenever you need the numbered list to be broken up or intermingled with other paragraphs or list items, define a list style that's part of a paragraph style. For example, in a technical manual, you might want a numbered list for headings that continues across multiple text frames, and you might want to use running captions for images and tables. Define a separate list for each type of numbering.

See the Defining lists Help topic.

I don't intend to be very active on this blog for the next few months for double top secret reasons that may or may not have to do with the characters C, S, and 5. I'll focus on short and sweet posts, like this one.

Here's a little tidbit from the Format a bulleted or numbered list Help topic.

When you italicize or bold the first word of a bulleted or numbered list paragraph, the formatting is applied to the number as well, making it inconsistent with the rest of the numbering. Like this:

See how the number 3 is italicized just like the first word? That's ugly. So what's the solution? Apply a character style to the numbering. Here's what it says in Help:

By default, bullets and numbers inherit some of their text formatting from the first character in the paragraph to which they're attached. If the first character in one paragraph is different from the first characters in other paragraphs, the numbering or bullet character may appear inconsistent with the other list items. If this is not the formatting you desire, create a character style for numbers or bullets and apply it to your list by using the Bullets And Numbering dialog box.

Now, back to the fun stuff!