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In this video I want to talk about using tab
stops and dot leaders. Tab stops you're going to use for all kinds of things but
I have a pretty good example here of something where you might
do it. You see this in menus all the time. You see an item
and then you have a lot of dots and then you have the price of the item. The dots
are put in so you can follow the line across to see the price.
Sometimes it gets confusing if you see a big menu and theres lots of items and you
have to look a distance across you start to lose track, so that's what the leaders for.
This has been done with just putting in individual
spaces and dots. You can see that there's some problems.
First of all, I've screwed up in my typing so I
put in the wrong amount of dots and spaces so I have an extra
and that's problematic. Second of all, even if I
try to get this close you'll notice that
things don't line up perfectly. I'm just pressing command+R
or control+R on the PC for my ruler. If I bring in a guide
notice that the decimals here aren't perfect.
They're all kind off of this vertical.
Those are some of the issues that you're dealing with when your formatting.
You want everything to look consistant.
If you don't use what I'm going to show you the chances of
that being inconsistant are pretty good. So first of all lets get rid of all this
garbage. I'm going to highlight all of those
if we view invisibles, go into Type
Hidden Characters you'll notice that they're all these spaces
in between and I obviously have paragraph returns after each
of these. So i'm going to just highlight all of the periods and spaces and
replace them with one tab.
I'm going to do that in each one of these cases.
First thing you'll notice is that when I apply
a single tab it goes in half inch increments.
In fact, here's another quick trick if you right click on
a ruler you can change it's formatting. Notice that
we're looking at this in terms of inches.
This type basically ends about a quarter inch
comes over to three quarter inch, so when you're dealing with
tabs just normally in Illustrator as I put them in
they're at about a half an inch from each other.
Now people who don't know how to do tab formatting will
just end up putting in a whole bunch of tabs. Don't do that.
Just put in one and let Illustrator do the rest for you.
I've put in my tabs. The next step
highlight all three lines because I want them to all
be formatted at once. In fact you know what we'll do our
paragraphs styles, so I'm going to only do one of these lines and then we'll apply this to
the other two. So I have one line selected and in fact I don't even have to
have the whole line selected, I could just have part of it selected.
I'm going to go under window to Type
Sorry, over to Tabs or command+shift+T.
By the way, when you use this you can move
this ruler around but if you ever need it back to
above that line of type where it's most handy, go ahead and press this little
magnet it'll snap it to the top of the box
you're working on. Okay so with this line
put in I can now just click right above the ruler
and what it's going to do is it's going to put in the tab stop
and no matter where it was at
it's going to now move over to this location. So it's just
dragging along here and moving these guys to where
ever it needs to be. Now, left tabs
stops. What happens with those? That's the one that's chosen by default
a left tab stop aligns the text after
the tab, to the left of the tab, then it progresses to the right.
So it's kind of like left aligned text. You can change it.
You can have center aligned so now it centers that tab text
underneath this mark. Right aligned will put it to the left
of the tab mark. So this is nice if you have
something that's on the edge of the page and you need to have those items right aligned.
It's kinda nice. And finally a decimal tab. A decimal tab
aligns to a decimal point thats in your text.
If I click and drag this guy, let's see if I can click and grab it.
I'm going to line it right up on my ruler guide so that we can
see it. Yeah notice it aligns right to the
left of that decimal point.
By the way, notice in here you can align on a couple of different things.
By default its a decimal point, you could change it to
a dollar sign if you wanted. Put in a dollar sign instead.
press tab, notice that in now aligns on the dollar sign.
What I really want it to do is the decimal because
that's pretty typical with pricing. If you have things that are
20 dollars or 15 cents you want everything to
be nice and aligned vertically.
So we've got this set up. A dot leader, you'll notice there's a little field
for leaders. I'm just going to put in one period
and if I press tab it goes ahead and
updates and fills the tab stop with those leaders. Now personally
I feel like that's a little heavy.
So I usually put in a dot and a space. You can actually put in
a good number of things in there but I'm just going to use
a dot and a space. Now, that comes in and now I
have this nice little dot leader applied. Great.
My work with tabs, now how can I
apply this to the other guys. Well, first of all if you're just doing a small amound you could just
have all of them selected at once. But if you're
working with a group you can use a paragraph style.
Tabs are part of paragraph styles. So I'm going to just
come back here and click anywhere in this first paragraph
go under Window, to Type
Paragraph Styles. Notice this is from my last
demo, so I had copy and subheads in here. I'm just going to go ahead and make a new
style.
Double click on that. Notice that by double clicking it applies the style
and it also opens up the style box.
I'll just call this
tab with leader
and in this general information
there's all the stuff about space before, space after.
Here's the information that we want. Tab position
alignment, align to this, there's leader information in there.
Terrific. Press okay.
Now a little trick before that I was talking about
so I'm going to just option click on tab with leader
on all three paragraphs.
Now they all have that same look.
Notice how everything lines up. It's all perfect.
That's how you do this stuff. Whenever you do horizontal
spacing in Illustrator, or InDesign, or Word, or Quark Xpress
use tabs with using tab stop.
It's all the same across all of these.
The programs I just mentioned, store that as a style so you can have
that in a style that you apply. The great part is
say I click away so I'm working on this
and later I choose that I actually want to have this
change...let's click the little magnet on here.
Going to go ahead and close this tab stop.
Let's say I want this to change so it now looks maybe
more of a gap. I just double click on tab with leader
come in, notice there is a tab field there. Here's my positioning.
This is why setting up the style visually is so helpful because
it's really hard to see these leaders
otherwise. I'll go ahead and grab this guy
and drag it over to 3 inches, 2.99 that good.
Notice that it automatically updates the style and everything
adjusts. That is the beauty of the paragraph style
and obviously you can see the usefulness of a dot leader. Let me know if you have any questions.