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This is a long article that's only going to get longer as I find more and more text effects to add to the gallery -- and this is only a small sample of the many ways in which you can manipulate text in InDesign.

To skew the text like this, I selected characters on the left side of the word and applied a negative skew value, and then I selected characters on the right side of the word and applied a positive skew value. See Skew type in InDesign Help.

It's show and tell time. I'll show you pictures of tabs and indents, and I'll tell you how to create the effect. Or, at least I'll point you to the Help topic that tells you how to do it.

When you press the Tab key, the insertion point moves to the next tab setting. If you haven't manually entered any tab settings, default tab settings appear every 3p. These tab settings don't appear on the Tabs ruler.

1. Choose Type > Tabs to display the Tabs ruler (also called the Tabs dialog box).
2. Click above the ruler where you want the tab setting to appear.
3. On the left side of the Tabs ruler, click to indicate which type of setting you want (Left, Center, Right, or Decimal).

See the Tabs and indents Help topic.

"How do I align the periods in a bulleted lists?" I've seen a variation of this question asked repeatedly in user forums. Here's an example of one such forum thread.

See how the periods don't line up after the numbers? The simple answer is to use right alignment and increase the First Line Indent value by increments until the numbering is aligned.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Select the numbered paragraphs.

2. Alt/Option-click the Numbered List button in the Control panel.

3. In the Bullets & Numbering dialog box, select Preview.

4. Choose Right from the Alignment menu.

5. Increase the Left Indent value to create a buffer.

6. Increase the First Line Indent value gradually until the periods are aligned.

Of course, if your numbering goes past 100, you'll have to add even more space. This same method works when you're editing a paragraph style that uses numbering.

We recently did a usability study on page numbering in InDesign. Participants worked through a series of page numbering tasks that I asked them to perform. Although I made a few changes to a couple of Help topics, I kept thinking that what people really needed was pictures of page numbering effects and brief descriptions of how to create those effects. So that's what I'm doing here. Perhaps later, I'll clean up the pictures and add this to Help.

Adding page numbering isn't the most intuitive task in InDesign. You basically create a text frame on a master page and insert the Current Page Number marker (choose Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Current Page Number). If your document has facing pages, remember to add page number markers to both master pages. See Add basic page numbering in Help.

Have you ever wanted to create page numbering (such as "Pages 4-5") on one page of the spread? Me, neither. But there must be some trendy new design style that puts both spread numbers on a single page. That's the only way I can account for the number of times this issue has come up in the forums.

The good news is that it's relatively easy to do in InDesign. The bad news is that a bug prevents it from working smoothly. The good news is that there's a fairly simple workaround. If you're keeping score at home, that's Good-2, Bad-1.

Here's how to create this quirky page numbering technique.

Step 1. In the Pages panel, open the master page where you want to add the page numbering, and create a text frame. In my case, I'm putting the numbering on the right master. Type any text that'll go along with the page numbering, and format the text.

For example, you may want to use a paragraph style that right-aligns the text and applies a font style used for headers.

Step 2. Choose Type > Insert Special Characters > Markers > Previous Page Number to insert the page number from the left-hand page. Insert a hyphen (or en dash), and then choose Type > Insert Special Characters > Markers > Current Page Number.

Of course, if you're adding the page numbering to the left master, you'll want to insert the current page number first and then insert the Next Page Number character after the hyphen.

In a perfect world, you'd be done. But there's a catch -- and we haven't even gotten to the real bug yet. You have to thread the text frame on the right-hand page to a text frame on the left-hand page. You need to do this because the Previous Page Number and Next Page Number work on a story level, not on a document level.

Step 3. Create a text frame on the left master page, and thread it to the text frame on the right master page (click the out port, and then click the other text frame). Then place the insertion point at the beginning of the text that belongs in the next frame and choose Type > Insert Break Character > Frame Break.

It should work, right? Wrong. If you go to a document page to which the master is applied, you'll see the Previous Page Number is the same as the Current Page Number.

Here's where the bug enters the picture. For some reason, InDesign stumbles on the Previous Page Number if it's in a text frame that's based on a master page. Until this bug gets fixed, you need to override the master page item on every page where it appears. Ouch. The program team is aware of this bug, and I'm hoping it gets fixed by the end of summer.

Step 4. On each document page to which the master is applied, hold down Ctrl/Command+Shift and click the text frame with the page numbering.

Now that I've written out the steps, I think a more accurate score is Good-2, Bad-2. I'll revise this when the bug gets fixed.

To number steps in a document, you can keep it simple by just clicking the Numbered List button in the Control panel to number the current paragraph. And when you want to restart numbering for a new set of steps, just Alt/Option-click the Numbered List button and change the Start At number to 1. That may be a fine approach if you have only one or two sets of steps, but if you have more, you'll want to automate your layout with styles.

Let's suppose your text layout looks something like this:

What's the best way to restart numbering?

The numbering needs to be restarted after the "To insert a gadget" head step. One way to do this is to create two different styles for steps, such as "Steps Begin" and "Steps Continue." That's a perfectly fine approach. But in this document, we know that steps appear only after a "Head Step" style, so let's take advantage of that.

I've already covered how to create numbered lists for outlines and multi-level lists. Now I'm going to walk through the steps of adding figure numbers, such as "Figure 1-1," "Figure 1-2," and so on. Using sequential numbering for lists of figures is common in technical manuals and user guides. I actually did a fairly thorough job in the Creating running captions for figures and tables Help topic if I don't say so myself, but it may be helpful to demonstrate this process with a specific type of caption list.

Running caption for figures

In Part I, I covered how to create a traditional outline list. Now I'm going to walk through the steps of creating a multi-level list frequently used in academic papers, user guides, and military documents.

When I wrote the InDesign Help topic on creating multi-level lists, I wasn't able to go into the detail that I wanted to. Sure, a person can use the steps to figure out how to create multi-level lists, but without concrete examples, it's not exactly easy. So I'm going to walk through the steps of different multi-level numbered lists. First, I'll show how to create a simple outline in InDesign:

Whenever people ask if they can create endnotes in InDesign, I have to explain the same sad story. No, InDesign has footnotes not endnotes, but you can download a plug-in . . . Now, thanks to Peter Gold's comment in the InDesign user forum, I have a much better answer. While InDesign still doesn't have an Endnotes feature, it's easy to create endnotes in InDesign CS4 by using cross-references.

One of the big new features in InDesign CS4 is the ability to export InDesign documents to SWF format. When played in Adobe Flash Player or a web browser, SWF files look like slideshows, or flip books. SWF files are similar to interactive PDF files that include hyperlinks, page transitions, and navigation buttons. One difference is that SWF files include the whiz-bang page curl feature.

Tomasz Kuczborski created this sample SWF flip book. You can open it and play with the page curl feature. Just drag any corner of the page to turn it. Check it out:

Click here to view the sample file. You can also right-click the link and choose to download it.

In Part I, I described how to create a simple hot spot, or hot link, in which holding the mouse pointer over an area displays a pop-up image. Now I'll describe how to create a clickable hot spot -- one that requires the user to click an area to display an image.

The steps for doing this are different in InDesign CS3 and CS4. Keith Gilbert described how to build PDF tooltips (PDF) in InDesign CS3.

Creating a Clickable Hot Spot (CS4)

We're going to use the Show/Hide Button action to display the hidden button when we click. (If you're familar with creating buttons in Acrobat, "Show/Hide Button" in InDesign is the same as "Show/Hide a Field" in Acrobat.) To create a hot spot that appears when you click, we'll need to create two separate buttons -- one to define the hot spot area and the other to appear when the hot spot area is clicked.

1. Use the Rectangle tool to drag a box over the area you want to define as the hot spot.

In my example, I created a box over the Paris area on the stunningly beautiful map of France.

2. Turn the rectangle object into a button. To do this, select the object, and then either click the [Normal] state in the Buttons panel, or choose Object > Interactive > Convert to Button.

Here's another "Bonus Documentation" entry in which I flesh out a task that falls outside the scope of our documentation. When I wrote about creating buttons in InDesign, I included a topic called "Creating button rollover states" that merely hints at one way of creating a hot spot. After I write this blog entry, I'll link to it from that Help page.

TIP: If you create blog entries or videos for InDesign, or are aware of useful links, please add a comment with a link to the related Help topic. It's a good way to highlight valuable community content.

Let's suppose you have a map of France, and you want the Eiffel Tower to appear when (1) the user hovers the mouse pointer over the Paris area or (2) the user clicks in the Paris area.

In InDesign Help, I wrote about using preference settings to determine whether a scaled text frame has a magnifying glass effect: It's buried in a list of notes:

If you edit the text or scale a frame within threaded frames when the Adjust Scaling Percentage preference is selected, the text is scaled, even if it moves to a different frame. However, if Apply To Content is selected, any text that flows to a different frame as a result of editing is no longer scaled.

Got that? I'd like to flesh out this idea a bit on my blog, where I don't have to concern myself with a limited scope and translation resources.

Here's a quirky InDesign issue. When you change preference settings, some settings apply only to the current document, while other settings apply to all documents.

The bottom line is that if you want your preference settings to apply to all new documents you create, close all documents before changing settings.

If you want to know which specific settings are document-specific and which ones are application-specific, keep reading...