Put It On My Tab (The Ins and Outs of Tabs in InDesign)

We’ve all been there. Working with text in Adobe InDesign and suddenly we realize the content needs to be formatted with tabs, but rather than wrestle with that intimidating tool, we resort to hitting the space bar multiple times to fake a tab. No one will know the difference, right?

Regrettably, it’s time for some tough love. We just can’t let you go on like this; because what feels like a simple shortcut at the time is only a temporary band-aid, and it can actually turn into a mess later on.

For example, we know of a designer who kept avoiding learning how to use tabs and continued using spaces until the day he was working in a project where the text had been provided with two spaces after every sentence. Old school typewriter rules that some writers won’t let die.

Without thinking he did a “Find/Replace”, and everywhere there were 2 spaces next to each other, disappeared. You can imagine what happened to all of those fake tabs. Yikes!

In the interest of helping designers work more efficiently, and for all of those non-designers who sometimes find themselves working in InDesign, we’re going to look at the specifics of tabs.

What they are, how they work, and a few basic applications of them. By the end you will have more confidence using this tool and may actually start to have fun with it. (OK, fun may be pushing it, but that speaks to what kind of design nerds we are.)

The Tab Palette

Let’s start by pulling up the Tab Palette. You can access the palette by either clicking on the top Menu bar and selecting Tabs, or by using the hot key Shift-Command-T (Shift-Ctrl-T in Windows). Once you have that pulled up, we can identify the primary elements of the Tab Palette and what they do.

1. Left Align Tab – Sets a left-aligning tab
2. Center Align Tab – Sets a center-aligning tab
3. Right Align Tab – Sets a right-aligning tab
4. Decimal Align Tab – Sets a tab that aligns all copy on the decimal (super useful when lining up columns with dollar amounts)
5. Tab Position Box – Identifies the measurement where the selected tab is located and can use to type in a specific place to put a tab. (the example above is shows we have placed a tab at 6″)
6. Tab Leader Box – Repeats a character, or a set of characters in between tabs. You see this feature in action on table of contents with the repeated dots between the name of a chapter and page number.
7. Align On Box – This is used in conjunction with the Decimal Align Tab. This allows you to select a character to align with. If this is left blank, the default value aligned on is the decimal. (Rebecca wants to confess she’s never touched this, so basically feel free to ignore it) (While Dean wants to emphasize that he loves this feature)
8. Snap-To Tool – Adjusts the tab palette to the top of the text box you have selected.
9. Tab Position Indicator – This shows you the location of each tab and identifies the type of tab (the current example is a Center Align Tab)
10. First Line Indent and Left Margin – The top half of this indicator can be dragged to set the amount of indent for each paragraph. The bottom half of the indicator can be dragged to set the left margin.
11. Right Margin – This slider can be moved to allow you to set the location of the right margin. (Similar to left margin, this adjusts the location of the right margin and is a method to shorten the width of your text.)

Example of Tab Usage

Now that we have walked through the palette, let’s look at a simple application of tabs. As with most functions, there are multiple ways to arrive at a solution, but we will show you one way to do it. The more familiar you get with the tool, you can decide what approach works best for you.

To understand which tab we want to use in a particular situation, let’s get clear about the 3 most-used tabs: left, right and centered. Depending upon the type of text you are working with you may not notice the difference at first. It’s only when we are dealing with more characters that we can see how the text is aligned to the right, left or centered.

We will work with sample copy for a table of contents because that will give us a chance to focus on a number of features that use tabs. Here is our sample text.

The first thing we recommend when working with tabs is to have Overprint Preview turned off and Show Hidden Characters turned on. You find the Overprint Preview option in the top menu bar at View>Overprint Preview and the Show Hidden Characters in the top menu bar at the Type>Show/Hide Hidden Characters.

When Overprint Preview is turned off and Show Hidden Characters is turned on, it identifies all of the various hidden characters that are present, which can be very helpful in understanding the formatting. Every space is signified by a blue dot, paragraph returns are shown as a backward P and, as you will see, even tabs have a corresponding symbol as shown in the graphic to the right. If you want to see a full list of InDesign hidden characters, just click here.

We have replaced the spaces after the titles with a tab character, which looks like a double arrow. Of course just adding a tab doesn’t change anything because we haven’t assigned a value to the tabs yet, so that’s our next step.

In our working example, we are going to place a right align tab at the 5″ mark. Highlight the text that you want to apply a tab and either drag a tab onto the ruler or click on the bar and it will place a tab.

Once you have a tab selected you can change it to a different type of tab or change it’s position, either by dragging the actual tab or typing into the tab position box.

The next thing we can do to our table of content is to indent the content. Highlight the lines of text and then drag in the Left Margin on the ruler.

It is important to remember when using the Tab Palette that you can only apply tabs to the text you have selected. You can move the sliders and set tab markers until the cows come home (whatever time that may be), but if you have not selected any text before doing it, you have wasted your time.

No table of content would be complete without ellipses directing the eye from the title to the page number. With the text highlighted and the tab selected, type a period into the Tab Leader Box and hit Return or press the Tab key. You will then have a line of dots running the length of the selected tab.

If these dots are too close to each other, you can instead type a period and a space in the Tab Leader Box to get something more like this:

Whatever you type into the Leader box will repeat up to the selected tab. Once you start using tabs you will see how much more quickly you can make comprehensive adjustments and edits. For example, if the above example required the width of the table of content adjusted. You would have to select and delete spaces from each line, and the truth is that sometimes the text still wouldn’t be lined up correctly.

However, with tabs in place, you can highlight the text, move the tab and you are done…easy peasy!

For those of who have had some trepidation about working with tabs, we hope you are starting to warm to the idea and are willing to give it a try. We promise that once you start using them, you will never go back to using fake tabs again. And, when you see others still using multiple spaces or periods to fake a tab, you can pat their head, tilt yours to the side, and say, “Aww, I remember when I was scared of tabs too!”

Let us know in the comments if this type of tutorial is helpful and if there are other topics within InDesign, other Adobe software, or general design concepts that you would like to see covered in a future post. There are rumblings around our office of possibly putting together a course for new designers and non-designers about InDesign.

Any interest out there?