Compared to adjusting tab stops in paragraph styles, adjusting them in tabbed text is a cakewalk: just open the Tabs panel (Type > Tabs) and start dragging tab stops around. The panel snaps to the top of the text frame (assuming there’s room for it) and adjusts its tab ruler width to match the text frame, all by default:
If there isn’t room for the panel – you’ve zoomed in so much that the top of the text frame isn’t visible, for example – you can always drag it manually into position, and use its Resize corner on the lower right to stretch or shrink the ruler as necessary.
But when you’re adjusting the tab stops in a style, you’re hampered by a tiny tab ruler that’s less than 5″ wide:
What are you supposed to do if you need to adjust a style’s tab stop that’s sitting at 6.125″ or something, out in the twilight zone to the right? You can’t resize the Paragraph Style Options dialog box, there’s no corner handle to grab onto. (And I’ve tried anyway, many times. Doesn’t work.)
To reveal hidden tab stops further down the ruler, some people just add a temporary tab to the ruler and then drag that tab to the right, which forces the ruler to auto-scroll over. But the autoscroll moves at a speed close to a bazillion miles per hour, invariably causing me to release the mouse button in a panic. Which means I now have an extra tab, and can I remember where I dropped it? When there’s a thicket of tabs? No.
Then I learned this trick: Hover your cursor over the tickmarks in the ruler and start dragging. The cursor turns into a little fist, allowing you to autoscroll the tab ruler without adding a tab, and the speed of the scroll is entirely under your control.
I made a little video to show you:
[flv:styletabs.flv 375 225]
Pretty neat, huh? MuchÃsimas gracias to Brad Walrod, Quark/InDesign guru and an old friend, who mentioned this technique in a post to the InDesign mailing list a couple months ago.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on April 8, 2008
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