Formatting text in Illustrator - paragraphs - numbered lists

Question

I have this really "great" task of creating something in Illustrator that shouldn't be normally done with Illustrator...I am no gonna go into details about that, im just saying so no one starts blah blah-ing about this should not be done in Illustrator.

The problem is that I am creating an instruction booklet and I have a lot of pages with numbered lists, on those numbered lists I want the numbers to be in the same text box as the information that is being listed, but I can't figure it out how to make the text align with the line before, not with the number. Is there a way to do this in Illustrator? Maybe with Paragraph Styles ?

Have a look at the pic to understand better what I mean, In the first circle is what I get and in the second circle is something close to what I want but I did it manually by adding extra spaces on the second line of text.

Answer 1

hahaha!!... found it.. I have little patience for this task I doing so I rushed a bit about asking this question without google-ing properly. (again :D)

What I was looking for was in the Paragraph Style as i guessed. Paragraph Style Options > Tabs . And you can see in the screenshot there are quite handy small things on that Ruler for doing that, or you can enter a numeric value in the boxes bellow.

I am a bigginer in things like this, so if anyone can explain more on the Paragraph Style Options stuff in there...go ahead please!

Answer 2

You don't really want to tab at the beginning of the line of a paragraph - so set an indent that is the same value as the tab and a negative first line indent for the bullet.

So eg.: (using your example) Left indent: 4.13mm; First line indent -4.13mm and Tab 4.13mm When you enter your text [number]tab [your para copy] and keep going. When it flows onto the next line it will line up with the tab.

So - when you areas text changes widthall your text still lines up with further changes.

Answer 3

Using tabs select from the two small triangles at the front of the ruler used to set the left justification. You can select the lower triangle and move it inline with your tab instead of at the beginning of the ruler where it sits by default.