Use Baseline Shift to center Text in Text Wrap

I’ve seen people misuse the baseline shift setting too often and have become a bit weary of the setting altogether. But I saw a student use it to center text within a text wrap and I have to say, I can’t think of a better way to do this.

Since text wraps will cause the text to wrap to the next line, and that’s dependent on the text size and leading, and so on, it’s often difficult to get the text wrap item centered properly within the text flow. But since baseline shift will shift the text placement, but not the frame placement, it’s a great solution to nudge the text to where you want it to go!

 

Problems with InDesign Bullets: Indented Unordered Lists and Text Wraps

Bullet and Numbered lists became a feature in InDesign relatively late in the scene, and yet never seem to work quite right. It is really bad at accommodating text re-flows and reformatting. This is the problem I had recently.

• I wanted to make an unordered list (bullets) where there are indents.
• Bullet lists don’t allow levels, but that’s okay. I just define a 2nd list with a bigger indent. (FIGURE I)
• Now, I want to put in a picture of an orange. The orange is square because we can see what goes wrong with our text better (FIGURE II).
  • My list loses the indenting! My “types of berries” is lined up to the same place as my “berry category”
  • Also, WTF happened to the space between my bullet and where my text starts? There is a giant gap!
  • And when the text is long, such as “Blueberries”, my second line indent is also messed up.
• This is why it’s screwing up.
  • By default, InDesign offsets the bullets using the Indent spacing (Left Indent, First Line Left Indent), which starts measuring from the edge of the text box. When the text is displaced by a text wrap, it’s no longer in the area where the Indent spacing can affect it.
  • By default, InDesign adds a [tab] character to after the bullet character. The tab start measuring (you guessed it) from the edge of the text box. When the text is displaced, it grabs the next available tab, which may be really far away.
  • The second line of my indented bullet list suffers from the same problem. The setting for the indent offset by the text wrap and doesn’t work.
• Let’s start by fixing a few things. This are things I would do to ALL bullet and numbering lists. (FIGURE III)
  • change the [Text After] from a tab to an [em space] or an [en space]. The spaces work much better as part of the text flow than the [tab]. Also, if your text becomes extremely large, or extremely tiny, the em/en space will grow/shrink along with your text, where as a hard set tab won’t.
  • Add an [indent to here] character to the beginning of each list. This will take care of the 2nd line indent.
  • This are looking much better already!
• What about the indent? Well, I’m glad you made it this far, cuz I’m actually pretty proud of this one. (Figure IV)
  • Fist, drop the bullet list and change it to a numbered list. Numbered lists have many more options to play with.
  • In the Bullets and Numbering Options Dialog Box, change the [number:] format and add an em space as the first character. This is now your indent!
  • Then, instead of inserting a number, cut and paste a bullet [^B] character into the field.
  • Then, add another em space.
  • Instead of being a numbered list, you’ve effectively changed this into a bullet list.
  • The format is [em space_bullet_em space]
• As you can see from Figure IV, “clementine” still fell by the wayside a bit. So you still have to keep an eye on your lists. In this case, i would extend the bottom portion f the text wrap offset to move that list in.

Here is a side by side comparison of the options available for a bullet list and a numbered list: the ^m^B^> is what I used to create my offset.

Where The Text Wraps Are: InDesign Text Wrap Options

Here are all the locations I can suss out in InDesign where you can change text wrap settings.

Text Frame Options

Preferences

Text Wrap Panel

Layer Options

Here are some of the settings that I think are imporant:

• Text Wrap Panel Drop Down Menu [Apply to Master Page Only]: This object level setting is applied to objects with text wraps on Master Pages. When applied, the object only affects items on the master page, and won’t text wrap text on your regular pages.
• Text Frame Options [Ignore Text Wrap]: Negates the effects of text wrap completely for this text frame. Good for text that has to go over an image or something.
• Layer Options [Suppress Text Wrap When Layer is Hidden]: With this selected, when the layer with text wrap items is hidden, your text will re-flow as if there is no text wrap applied.
• Preferences > Composition > Text Wrap: Text wrap options for your entire document. Selecting [Text Wrap Affects Only Text Beneath] means you can apply text wrap via stacking order.

Text Wrap Doesn’t Work on Tables in InDesign!

It had never occurred to me to try it until someone asked–probably because no one really would design this way, but text wrap in InDesign doesn’t work on text if the text is in a table cell!