Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Hanging indents (2)

We recently posted a blog showing how to create hanging indents in Atlantis with a few tab stops and Ctrl+T to align lines vertically. The examples we gave were basic "one-tier" structures:



But at times you might want to build "two-tier" hanging indents like this one:



Here is how to proceed in a few easy steps:

1. Make sure the "Special Symbols" mode is on in the Atlantis document window (Ctrl+Shift+8). All the typed characters will be visible: this will make things easier for you.

2. Type the whole of your text like this:



Note that the first-level paragraphs are all preceded by a tab character: this is because you want all these (three) items to align vertically. Also note that the second-level paragraphs have lines separated by "line breaks" (Shift+Enter).

Obviously, the above "draft" text needs to be formatted further to achieve the desired effect.

We need to push the second-level lines (the literary works) to the right so that they align vertically as intended (under their respective author's name).

Let's place the insertion cursor within the first batch of these second-level lines (in our example, within the works of Joyce), and press Ctrl+M repeatedly until we achieve the desired alignment, like so:



We now need to repeat the same procedure for the second and third batch of second-level lines (in our example, within the works of Wolf and Lowry), with this as a result:



The second and third first-level paragraphs now need to be pushed to the right to align them vertically with the first first-level paragraph. This is done by selecting them both first:



We can now press Ctrl+M repeatedly until we achieve the desired effect:



Here is the same text with the "Special Symbol" mode off:




This tip is also available as a downlodable document in the RTF format.

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