Creating Backward Bullets in InDesign

Despite InDesign’s incredible range of formatting options when creating bullets, there seems to be one thing you cannot edit: the location of the bullet. Bullets (and numbered lists, too, for that matter) are always added at the left side of your text, at the start of the paragraph. But sometimes you might want a bullet or special character at the end of your paragraph (Figure 1).

You could just type the character, of course, but that’s not very efficient, and you might miss a paragraph accidentally. If you know GREP, you could pretty easily add the character at the end of each line using the Find/Change dialog box. But that adds the bullet as a real character, which means you cannot include it in a style. You might even try to add the bullet and then align the text to the right. Unfortunately, that results in the whole paragraph being flush right (Figure 2). What you really want is to keep the text left aligned while having the bullet appear at the end of the paragraph—and, for good measure, to create this as a style so you can then apply this treatment consistently throughout your document. It turns out there is a sneaky way to tackle this problem. And the good news is that it uses the actual Bullets and Numbers option in InDesign.

Create Placeholder Text

To make this trick work, we have to tell InDesign to use the right side as the origin of the paragraph. This means that when a bullet is created at the

beginning of the paragraph, then that beginning must be at the right side. This might seem impossible, but actually this is exactly what we have when working with Middle Eastern texts. Unfortunately, there is no native right-to-left option in InDesign… or is there? You may know that in InDesign, you can customize the language of your placeholder text. Today many people are used to the classic Latinesque Lorem Ipsum text. But what if you’re working on a more international job that requires placeholder text of a different origin, such as Cyrillic, Greek, or Japanese? Well, for those cases, you can choose a different flavor of placeholder text. Use the following steps to achieve this:

1. Create a text frame using the Type tool.
2. Hold down the Command (Mac OS) or Ctrl (Windows) key and choose Type > Fill with Placeholder Text.
3. Choose Arabic or Hebrew (Figure 3).

InDesign fills your text frame with that language (Figure 4), and automatically sets it to right-to-left text (Figure 5). Behind the scenes, it also quietly turns on the World Ready Paragraph Composer, which is part of what makes this trick work.

Convert the Text to Your Preferred Style

The reason you added Hebrew or Arabic text is because this is the only way (apart from a script or plug-in) to get one unique property: right-to-left text! Let’s take a closer look at what we have here: place your text cursor inside this new text, and open the Paragraph Styles panel by choosing Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles. Click the panel menu, and choose New Paragraph Style (Figure 6).

InDesign will soak up all this text formatting in your newly created style, because you had a selection of it. Take a closer look at the formatting (Figure 7)—do you see it? There’s a text option here called Paragraph Direction: Right-to-Left. And that’s what we want, though of course unless you are actually planning to use Arabic or Hebrew text, you need to change it to a type style you do want.

1. Name your new style, click the Apply Style to Selection checkbox at the bottom of the New Paragraph Style dialog box, and then click OK to save this new style.
2. Delete most of the text, until you’re left with one line of text which will act as your title placeholder. Change the characters by typing some new text that you can actually read.
3. Change the font, size, horizontal alignment, color, and any other formatting you want, until the text looks the way you want it.

Create the Bullet Character

Now it’s time to add the actual bullet character. While the text cursor is in the text, go to the Paragraph formatting options in the Control panel and click the Bulleted List button to add a bullet to your title. Notice anything? The bullet is added to the right side of the text instead of the left side (Figure 8).

So far, so good. But the text itself is still right aligned. So click the Align Left button in the Paragraph Formatting options to put the text back at the left side of your text frame (Figure 9). Now it’s time to personalize the bullet character. Hold down the Option/Alt key, and click again on the Bulleted List button in the Control panel to open the Bullets and Numbering options. Notice that there is something strange going on here: Anything you type in the Text After field actually shows up before the bullet instead of after (Figure 10). Depending on the character you choose for your bullet, it may appear backward in your text frame. For example, in Figure 11 you can see I added a right-pointing arrow from the Zapf Dingbat font, but the character is pointing the wrong direction when I applied it as a bullet character. Because of this, I added the opposite arrow from the same Zapf Dingbat font, and chose that as my bullet instead. Click OK when you’re done, to close the Bullets and Numbering panel. Now that you have made all these changes since creating your original paragraph style, you now have to update the style by choosing Redefine Style from the Paragraph Styles menu (Figure 12). Your title style with alternate bullet is finally ready to be applied to your text!

Play Around!

This method also works with numbered lists. Figure 13 shows an example of the same technique, but this time I used a Numbered List instead of a bullet character, and I added both an em dash and a character style to the automatic numbering.

There is one significant problem with this technique that I must share: Any punctuation character at the end of the line is misplaced to the beginning of the line! For example, if your heading ends with an exclamation point, InDesign puts that character before the first word. Oops. Fortunately, now there is an incredibly helpful script that creates a backward bullet paragraph style and fixes that punctuation problem! See the sidebar, A Scripted Solution.