Building a Template for Tabbed Documents in InDesign
Master the tricky task of making custom tab dividers for books and binders
This article appears in Issue 16 of CreativePro Magazine.
This article appeared in Issue 16 of CreativePro Magazine.My work is niche: I create captain’s manuals for custom yachts, which are delivered in binders with tab dividers marking many sections of complex technical material (Figure 1). Whatever niche your InDesign work fills, you might have a similar need to deliver custom tab sets occasionally—or regularly. In this article, I’ll show you how I do it by building a template that leverages some of InDesign’s most powerful long-document features. I’ll also discuss the sometimes-harsh realities of getting tabs printed, so you’ll know everything involved in this kind of project.
Figure 1. Tab dividers mark multiple sections of complex technical material.
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Kelly, this is a great tutorial, and I would love to make it work for my workflow, but how do you deal with a label that has too many characters and gets scrunched because it is a text variable?
Hi Melise, In that case, you likely need to expand the text variable so that it is live text. Alternatively, you could use two text variables for your long tab text: Line 1 and Line 2.