Put Bullets Before and After a Heading in InDesign

Maha wrote: In the paragraph style, how to create bullets before and after the text.

Well, InDesign’s automatic bullets feature (which you would use for a list) only places bullet characters at the beginning of a paragraph. You can kind of fake it, putting the bullet at the end, which Bart Van de Wiele described in Issue 56 of InDesign Magazine, and which I modified for numbering in this article.

But that technique won’t let you put a bullet on both sides of a heading.

There is one way to do it, though… it’s kind of a hack, but it works, as long as the heading is only a single line.

Here’s the result:

And here’s how it’s done: Use a Rule Above and a Rule Below.

The Rule Above is a dotted, very thick rule that extends past the end of the text:

The Rule Below is a solid, even thicker white (Paper) stroke that covers up the blue dots:

Oh, and to keep the whole thing inside the text frame, I also increased the Left Indent a bit.

So, however long the line of text, the strokes extend a little farther on the left and right. The “dot” size and color is based on the Rule Above.

It takes a little experimentation to get right, but once you have it, it’s a paragraph style, so it’s easy to apply over and over again.

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