In this week’s InDesignSecrets video, Mike Rankin explains how easy it actually is to right-align numbered lists on a decimal. By taking advantage of a little-known feature, he demos a foolproof way to assure those decimal points always line up!
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This article was last modified on August 29, 2025
This article was first published on June 17, 2020
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However, it might be a bug… in RTL paras, you have to do a subtraction of the textbox width minus the found value as it appears to read from LTR.
GENIUS!!!
Thanks, Jane :)
You’re missing Top Hat from your list of movies :-) (love this tip anyway!)
Great movie!
:-)
And great tip! I thoroughly enjoy all your videos, thank you!!
Thanks, Donna! :)
Very easy and very useful! Thanks!
Over the years, I have used every possible clumsy way of doing this. Thanks for showing us the way.
If you use tabular, rather than proportional, figures (almost always the right choice for lists and tables), none of this is necessary and the numbers in the list are even on left and right. Paragraph Style Options > OpenType Features > Figure Style: Tablular Lining or Tablular Oldstyle.
Yes of course, but there are plenty of fonts that don’t have Tabular figures and knowing how to quickly and easily decimal align list using any font is a good thing.
That is easily the most obscure InDesign feature I’ve ever seen, and very useful.