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.

You can specify any font glyph to use as a bullet character. See the Change bullet characters Help topic.

Sorry, you can't use placed images as bullets when using the Bulleted Lists feature, unless you can figure out a way to save the image as a glyph in a font. The workaround is to cut and paste the image into the paragraph as an anchored object. See Anchored objects in Help.

This image may give you enough information to line up the periods in a numbered list, but if you need more details, see the Aligning Punctuation in Numbered Lists article.

Creating multi-level lists seems intimidating at first, but it's really not that difficult once you grasp a few key concepts. While the Create multi-level lists Help topic is to generic to be helpful, the blog entry about Numbered Lists - Part II Multi-Level Lists gives more detailed information.

Also, check out this video about Creating an Automatic Numbered List by Gabriel Powell of Instant InDesign.

Read the Numbered Lists - Part I Outlines blog entry to see how to create traditional outlines.

You can learn how to restart numbering automatically after each section head from the Numbered Lists - Part IV Numbered Steps blog entry.

For information on creating running numbering for captions and tables, see the Numbered Lists Part III - Figure Captions blog entry and the Create running captions for figures and tables Help topic.

The bullet or number takes on the formatting of the first character in the paragraph. In this case, one of the bullets is red because the first word is red. To avoid this problem, apply a character style in the Bullets & Numbering dialog box. In this case, the character style would specify a black color. For more information, see the Format a bulleted or numbered list Help topic.

That's it. Let me know if I missed anything.

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!