Designer: Indenting bulleted lists

[lepr]

.

[toltec]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

 it will not do anything to position the following text unless a tab stop is set in that paragraph.

 

You are wrong, I'm afraid.

 

As I found out by accident, and owenr says.

[modiophile]

7 hours ago, R C-R said:

@modiophile

Which version of Designer & which OS (Mac or PC) are you using?

 

In your screenshot, it looks like both the Left Indent & First Line Indent are set to the same value (0.118"). Apparently, at least on Macs the First Line Indent is automatically (& annoyingly!) set to the same value that you enter for the Left Indent, but you can reset the First Line Indent to zero afterward to fix that.

 

Also, if you have already entered text & it spans more than one paragraph, make sure all the paragraphs are selected when you set or change values in the Paragraph panel, or those values will only apply to the currently selected paragraph.

@R C-R I am using the 1.5.5 on Mac and yes the First Line Indent is automatically set to the same value that you enter for the Left Indent. Good catch! After I set it to 0 and followed @toltec instructions, it looks fine!

3 hours ago, owenr said:

 

That's the same on a Mac: when first line indent is less than left indent, the first line has an automatic first tab stop at the left indent position, making it easy to neatly align numbered or bulleted lists.

 

The automatic First Line Indent actually prevents the user from having neatly aligned bulleted or numbered lists.

[lepr]

.

[modiophile]

2 minutes ago, owenr said:

 

It definitely helps me. Maybe you're not using it correctly.

 

 

See screenshot in your quoted post.

[lepr]

.

[lepr]

.

 

[modiophile]

I see whats happening, as long as the First Line Indent is at least half the amount of the Left Indent, than it works. In my example it is not being utilized, as it is unnecessary to get the same result. Also just specifying a measurement (or not) in the Tab Stop field does absolutely nothing.

I created a new document to avoid copying text styles, here are my steps:

[lepr]

.

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, owenr said:

Wrong again. The software provides automatic tab stops. Repeating myself: "[...] when first line indent is less than left indent, the first line has an automatic first tab stop at the left indent position." Note the word automatic. Characters following the first tab character will start at that automatic tab stop if the tab character is inserted to the left of that automatic tab stop.

How do you know that there is an "automatic" tab stop at the left indent & it is not just the first line indent setting that is positioning text as if there was an actual tab stop at that setting?

 

It seems to me that if it really was an actual tab stop, even if it was automatically created by the software, it would show up in the list of tab stops for that paragraph. Do you see that or any other indication it is not simply the first line indent function being applied?

[modiophile]

2 hours ago, owenr said:

You're getting there, but the statement "as long as the First Line Indent is at least half the amount of the Left Indent, than [sic] it works" isn't correct in general, although it may be true in specific circumstances.

It is true that tab stops specified in the Tab Stops section are not applied in the extent between First Line Indent and Left Indent. In that range, the only tab stop is the automatic one that's provided at the Left Indent distance when First Line Indent is to the left of Left Indent.

Ok, so after realizing that I want the bulleted list indented (not just what comes after the bullet), I see that the Left indent and Tab Stop becomes necessary. @owenr Would you please tell me how in the world you got the tab space after the first bullet in your example to be so small? By default the very first tab performed, is huge, regardless if I add a Tab Stop or specify it in the Tab Stop field.

[lepr]

.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

How do you know that there is an "automatic" tab stop at the left indent & it is not just the first line indent setting that is positioning text as if there was an actual tab stop at that setting?

Apologies for continuing with this in yet another tl;dr post but maybe the following will make clearer what I am talking about. Please just ignore it if this is of no interest to you.

 

Consider this RTF formatted TextEdit document & the symbols it uses for indents & tab stops.

Compare that to the raw text in the file (here displayed using TextWranger to make everything visible):

In a RTF document, everything preceded by a backslash is a "control word." Consider the line "\pard\tx2820\li540\fi740\ri720\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0" in the info section. "\pard" denotes the beginning of a paragraph & "\li540" & "\fi740" denote its left indent & first line indent respectively. (The numbers are in "twips," the RTF unit of measurement equal to 1/20th of a point.)

 

If the paragraph had included tab stops, the RTF document would have included control words for them as well, like "\tx600" to specify a tab stop at 600 twips from the left margin. Other control words define the kind of tab stop. (For the few interested in such things RTF specs can be found on the web, for example at http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/rtfspec_7.html.)

 

From all this I hope it is evident that at least for RTF or anything else that uses similar "under the hood" methods for controlling text positions that tabs & indents are completely different things, even when they have the same effect.

[lepr]

.

 

[lepr]

.

[modiophile]

3 hours ago, owenr said:

 

The Left Indent and First Line Indent are doing the magic in my example. Nothing in the Tab Stops section was in effect.

Each bulleted paragraph has the bullet (which is at First Line Indent position of 6 mm) followed by a tab (which is automatically stopped at Left Indent position of 12 mm) followed by the text (which starts at Left Indent position of 12 mm).

 

bullets155.afdesign

Thanks for the file!

For proper formatting of bulleted lists, the bullet should be closer to the text than the left margin. You'll actually want the First Line Inedent to be more than half the Left Indent in order to achieve that. My assertion that the First Line Indent must be half or less of the Left Indent position was wrong.

Here are my updated steps:

 

NOTE: IF you set the First Line Indent first, AD will automatically specify the Left Indent for you!

If anybody from Affinity is reading this thread, it shouldn't be this difficult to properly format bulleted lists! I read somewhere that a Bulleted List text style is a feature that has been noted.

[lepr]

.

[modiophile]

3 hours ago, owenr said:

 

My example does achieve that with the First Line Indent being exactly half of the Left Indent. The bullet itself has width, so there is about 6 mm of space to its left and about 4 mm space to its right.

 

That's true, I didn't account for the width of the bullet itself.

[Fun Art Sam]

I'm also having problems with aligning lines of text in a bulleted list and it's very frustrating. This problem seems to only happen with 2 lines of text. 

I found one solution/fix by:

1. Copy and paste large blocks (https://www.lipsum.com/) of text to simulate the perfectly aligned bulleted list from this AD tutorial video: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/tutorials/publisher/desktop/video/337313778/ 
2. Copy and paste the text you need in the 3rd line of a block of text. Make sure that the lines of text stay aligned after pasting. 
3. Delete the original text that you don't need. 

I hope this helps other people who are struggling with this alignment problem. 

[MikeW]

2 hours ago, Fun Art Sam said:

I'm also having problems with aligning lines of text in a bulleted list and it's very frustrating. This problem seems to only happen with 2 lines of text. ...

#1. You can add filler text right from with AD.

#2. N/A

#3. N/A

File is attached.

With Spacing, you can move the paragraph in/out from the text frame edge by editing the Left Indent.

bullet-indent.afdesign

[Fun Art Sam]

@MikeW Hi Mike,

Thanks for your help.  I will try to do what you suggested next time I have a bullet list in a project. 

Take care and have a good day,

Sam

[ChinqMiau]

I just found this thread as I'm dealing with exactly the same problem. Even with all provided solutions I'm still struggling to figure this out. Very frustrating.

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, ChinqMiau said:

I just found this thread as I'm dealing with exactly the same problem. Even with all provided solutions I'm still struggling to figure this out. Very frustrating.

Without more information (details of exactly what you want, screen shots, or ideally a sample .afdesign document that illustrates your problem) it's unlikely we'll be able to help.

[slaytex]

You know what? This is BS.... this is just too difficult and that's not OK...they need to fix this. Honestly...this should NOT BE THIS HARD...come on.

[Phil P]

I have the same problems.  I have a numbered list. I want each line of text to horizontally align with the first letter of the first word in the first line of text, which is indented after the number.

I am on a PC, and Affinity Photo, Publisher and Designer 1.10.5.1342. I have tried to figure this out in both the Publisher and Photo personas. I've been at it for over an hour. I found this thread after about 20 minutes of frustration, and have tried everything in the thread. No joy.

Should it be this difficult to format a bulleted or numbered list? Maybe it's not even possible in Affinity?

Any help will be much appreciated.