Control the Indent of a Bulleted List in InDesign

Written by Kate Cahill.

See Adobe InDesign: Tips and Tricks for similar articles.

Tabs and indents can lead to frustration for a lot of new (and even not so new) InDesign users. I’ve seen the Tabs panel bring even experienced users to the verge of tears, so here are a few InDesign typesetting tricks.

New InDesign users who have worked mostly in MS Word or WordPerfect might not understand how InDesign handles bullet alignment. The key is to use Special Characters and White Space. You can use the Bulleted & Numbered Lists command, but maybe you don’t like the preset spacing, etc. So here’s how you do it yourself.

  1. In InDesign, open the Tabs panel by going to Type > Tabs (Ctrl-Shift-T on PC, Cmd-Shift-T on Mac)
  2. Set a left-aligned tab where you want your bullet. (I used 0p9 or .125”)
  3. Press the tab key on your keyboard before your first bullet text and type your bullet (Alt-8 on PC, Opt-8 on Mac).
  4. For proper space between the bullet and the text, go to Type > Insert White Space > En Space (Ctrl-Shift-N, Cmd-Shift-N).
  5. Go to Type > Insert Special Character > Other > Indent to Here (Ctrl-, Cmd-).

And that’s it! No messing around with the hanging indents. The result:
Bullet Indent image