How do I make a hanging indent on right-aligned text in InDesign?

Question

I am formatting a Hebrew bible in InDesign for my class, but I'm having trouble with making indents in a way that I can apply it to the entire copy.

It currently looks like this:

But I want it to look like this:

Is there anyway (1) to do this easily and (2) apply it to every line in the book? There are over 600 pages and I'd like to avoid doing it manually, if possible. I've looked into a number of articles explaining tabs and indents, but I can't seem to find anything relating to something like this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is not much to it. It’s the classic way to style lists in any design or word processing application.

Step 1: You indent the whole paragraph by a certain value, e.g. 20 mm

Step 2: You set a negative indent for first line with the same value, e.g. –20 mm

Step 3: You set a tab stop at the same value (e.g. 20 mm) and use a tab in every first line of the paragraph.

Now everything falls into place perfectly. The text in every first line because of the the tab, all following lines use the paragraph indendation. The figures in every first line are placed correctly through the negative indent.

Answer 2

First, take a look at @opentype's answer, as it is 100% correct and generally a proper way to do it. I wanted to add this as a comment to his answer, but not enough rep, so...

I couldn't help but notice this:

If this was tab-delineated, all lines of the verse text should align (if there was just one tab character in each paragraph, of course), but they don't. To me, it looks like there is a space of some kind between verse number and verse text, rather than a tab.

If you want to use whitespace to delimit numbers from text (but, better not), then the indent method will not work properly. Instead, you can put an Indent to Here marker between the whitespace and the beginning of the verse text. You can do that by selecting Type -> Insert Special Character -> Other -> Indent to Here. The remaining lines should all indent themselves to the vertical position of the marker. Here is how it looks:

I have used an em-space as a delimiter. Notice that there are no paragraph indents (all zero), yet they all line up exactly as you wanted. Here is how it looks with hidden characters:

The only nuisance with this method is that you need to add Indent to Here markers to each paragraph. It can be done using some GREP, though.