Tab Leaders (Part 2): Formatting Leaders

Pariah Burke

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Last week in the first part of this back to basics series on tab leaders we discussed creating dotted tab leaders in the Tabs palette to separate columnar text. Now, let’s talk about formatting those leaders.

Tab leaders–dots, underscores, hyphens, smiley faces, whatever–inserted via the Tabs Ruler are automatically the same font and color as the surrounding text. If you set a leadered tabstop amidst black 12/16 pt Electra LT Std Regular text, you’ll get a black 12/16 pt Electra LT Std Regular leader. And, if you change the character and paragraph attributes of the entire paragraph, the leader will change as well. Often times that’s exactly what you want. Often times, you’re satisfied with the chocolate covered coconut goodness of a Mounds bar. But, sometimes you feel like a nut (see Figure 1). Sometimes you want to go all the way and get yourself an Almond Joy. It’s at those times you want the tab leader to look a little different–maybe a different shade, color, or even typeface. Formatting the leader is the topic of this installment of “Tab Leaders,” and it’s easy.

First, set your text, and, following the instructions in “Tab Leaders (Part 1): Separating Columns of Text with Dots,” create the tab leaders. Close the Tabs Ruler.

As you can see with invisible characters shown (Type > Show Invisible Characters), InDesign treats tabs inserted with the keyboard TAB key as characters. They’re invisible characters, obviously, but characters nonetheless, and they can be formatted like any other character–visible or invisible. Using the Type tool, select just the tab character, which should now be represented by a visible (and printing) series of dots. Now you can format the leaders like you’d format any character–using the Character, Swatches, Color, or Gradient panels.

Want a leader that is a lighter shade of its current swatch color? Open the Colors panel and drag the tint slider to the left. Pick a new swatch to change the leader color entirely. Adjust the Tracking field on the Character panel to loosen or tighten the spacing between periods in the leader. How about larger periods? No problem: up the Font Size or even adjust the vertical or horizontal scale. Heck, if you don’t like the shape of the periods, you can change the Font Family and Style fields, too.

Of course, any changes you make to the tab and leader count as overrides to your paragraph style. If you ever force reapply the paragraph style or use one of the other methods of clearing overrides, your carefully formatted tab leaders will revert to matching their surrounding text. They will, that is, unless you create a character style just for the leader.

1. With the leader still highlighted, open the Character Styles panel (Window > Type & Tables > Character Styles). Click the New button at the bottom of the panel, which will create a new style, “Character Style 1.” (New character styles are numbered sequentially, so yours might read “Character Style 2” or another number.)
2. Double-click “Character Style 1” to open the Character Style Options dialog (see Figure 2).
3. Change the name to something more representative of the style’s function, something like “List 01 – Tab Leader” or whatever works for you. click the OK button.

Now, you’re done. By double-clicking the character style to access its options you also simultaneously assigned it to the highlighted tab character. Now highlight the tabs in the list’s other lines and assign the same character style to them.

Assigning character styles to the tabs can also be automated–you do it once, and thereafter InDesign will do it for you automatically. We’ll talk about that in part 4 of “Tab Leaders.” Next week in part 3 we’ll perform a very different task: inserting leaders in paragraph text to create write-in blanks such as you might find in a contract or form.

For now, there’s one other important bit of information I’d like to impart: The location of the tabstop and the fact that it has a leader is also an override to the paragraph style. To ensure that you don’t lose those bits of data, highlight a bit of text in your line–don’t include the tab in your selection. Then, on the Paragraph Styles panel (Window > Type & Tables > Paragraph Styles), open the panel flyout menu in the top right corner and choose Redefine Style (see Figure 3). That will add the location of the tabstop and its leader option to your paragraph style definition. Of course, if you hadn’t already created a paragraph style for the tab-separated list, create one using the same procedure as building a character style but on the Paragraph Styles panel.

Follow this link for part 3 in the series.