Reply To: Multi-level Bullets like in Word

Hi Tiffany

I see where you are coming from, and no Indesign only does levels for numbered lists as you say.

The way I could see this working if your bullets are normally introduced by a body paragraph is:
– make sure Body and most paragraph styles use “Space before” rather than “Space after” for regular spacing
– your preceding text should be defined to ‘keep with next’ so you would create a variant style such as ‘Body-KeepNext’ based on ‘Body’ but with the keep option set
– then you only need a single para style for each bullet level with no spacing before or after, and put the “space before” for the whole list on the preceding body para (i.e. add space after to Body-KeepNext).

This does not help with the “space after” your list, however. I personally wouldn’t put additional spacing after a bulleted list, it would take the normal ‘space before’ from whatever style comes next. However if your use case needs more than normal spacing then the above method would require you to have another Body variant with added ‘space before’ to suit. And just to add, if your preceding paragraph might be anything other than the Body-KeepNext style (e.g. and indented body style) then you’re back in the situation of creating lots of style variants.

Another potential solution if your objective is purely to add space around a bulleted list is to have a ‘dummy paragraph’ before and after your lists with the ‘List intro’ style having ‘keep next’ and your ‘List outro’ having ‘keep previous’ set. You then have no spacing on your bullet styles and set very small font size/leading and add spacing on these dummies to achieve your outcome. This isn’t ideal for a number of reasons: you have empty paragraphs to look after; if you have dummy paragraphs set with a small font it can be difficult to see where they are; and if your dummy paragraph appears at the top of a text frame it can offset the list. So like with many of these problems it depends on the actual content and layouts you’re dealing with.

Not sure that helps!

Nick