In this lesson, you are going learn about paragraph formatting in Adobe InDesign. I currently have the Advanced Workspace selected so that I can see my control panel, up across the top. If you do not see a panel at the top of your window, you can go to the Window menu to Workspace, and change it to the Advanced Workspace. I'm gonna go over to the toolbar, and select the Type tool. You will notice when we select the Type tool that our control panel changes, and we now have our formatting options for our text. When you click on the letter A, you see character formatting controls. When you click on the Paragraph icon, you get your Paragraph Formatting controls. Now one of the nice things about paragraph formatting in Adobe InDesign is that you do not have to have the entire paragraph selected in order to apply Paragraph Formatting. All you have to do is have your cursor somewhere in the paragraph when you apply those options. Now, we have four columns of information here: an aligning column, a spacing column, an indenting column, and a bullets column. We're going to talk about some of the options that we have for these four categories in Adobe InDesign. The first thing we're gonna talk about is aligning. Now our first paragraph says left aligned. If you're having a tough time seeing this, you can go to the View menu to zoom in a little bit to make it easier for you to see. So here, our first paragraph has left aligned, and we're gonna leave that as it is, because that's the default alignment for paragraphs that are created in InDesign. But sometimes we need to have our texts right aligned, so we're gonna put our cursor anywhere in that second paragraph that says right aligned, and we're gonna go up to the control panel. What's nice about InDesign is that when you put your cursor over the icons, a tool tip comes up to let you know what that icon stands for. So we're gonna click on the Right Align button. Now you'll notice, when we do that, all of our text becomes right aligned. Now this is a great feature to use as a design element, but when you're working with a lot of body copy, stay away from right aligning your texts because it does make it difficult to read. Now, the next paragraph says center aligned. Now we're gonna go back up to that alignment area, and we're gonna click on the Align Center button. Now again, align center is great for use with decorative elements, but it is also very difficult to read if you have a lot of text. Now the next area that we're gonna talk about is spacing. A lot of times when people choose to add spacing, they will add it by using the Enter or Return key. You can see I'm hitting the Enter key a couple of times, and I'm adding extra space. I'm just gonna delete those out. Yes, using that hard return does give us that extra space, but we don't really have all that much control over the space, and that cannot be built into paragraph styles, which is what we're gonna talk about next. So, we're gonna talk here about the Space Before, and Space After feature. If we put our cursor in that first paragraph after spacing, we're gonna go and again, look at our control panel, up across the top, and a little bit over from the Paragraph Alignment options. Uh, we do have Space Before and Space After, both in the top row of our control panel. With our cursor in that first paragraph, if we use the Space After feature, and I'm just gonna click a couple times on here, you can see that it's adding a little bit of space before my paragraph, and after that Paragraph icon. Now, we have the word headline just below that paragraph. And, here, I'm gonna ask add a little bit of space before so that it separates out my content. And, I'm also gonna add just a little bit of space after. Now what's nice about working with Space Before and Space After is that here we have a little bit more space above so that it's giving us the sense that okay, we're starting a new topic. And yet, there's a little bit of space below, but not too much so that it actually has those grouped together. So we can do that here to the second headline, do that same amount of space, a little bit after, and a little bit before. You can see that we do have a nice, neat flow to our text. Now the third paragraph formatting option we're gonna talk about is indenting. And if we put our cursor in the paragraph, right below the indenting, we can see that there are a couple of different ways that we can add indenting. If we put our cursor in that paragraph, and go up to the control panel on the bottom row, just beyond our alignment, is our first-line, left indent. If we increase that, you can see how it's moving just the text from our first line over a little bit to the right. So it's indenting just that first line. This is a great feature to use when you are trying to indicate new paragraph starting without using any extra space. Now, if we put our cursor in the second paragraph, and we go right above that first-line left indent, there is just a left indent. If we use this, you can see how it moves all of the text in the paragraph over. We also, just to the right of that, have a right indent. And if we choose to add space there as well, you can see how it indents our paragraph from both sides. So it's a way to set off your text when you are using paragraph formatting in a longer document. Now, the last feature that we're gonna talk about is in this last column. And here, I'm gonna add bullets. Now I want to add bullets across multiple paragraphs, so I'm gonna click and drag to select my text. And, a little bit, kind of in the middle, a little bit to the right of the middle is where we have our bulleting options. We can click on a bulleted list, and you can see how our text all moves over, and a bullet is placed at the beginning of each paragraph. If I select my text again, and change it to a numbered list, you can see, instead of having bullets, we do have numbers. So you do have bulleting, and numbering list options. I'm gonna put it back to bullets in InDesign. So, in this lesson, you learned about paragraph formatting in Adobe InDesign. Including aligning, spacing, indenting, and bullets.
