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Bulleted & Numbered Lists in Adobe InDesign

Bulleted and numbered lists can significantly enhance your layout when styled effectively. I frequently use this technique while designing various printed materials for my long-term client, EmC Leaders. Here’s an overview of my process in creating the proper Character and Paragraph styles :

1. Create a Bullet Character Style

First of all I create a new Character Style (Window > Styles > Character Styles) that defines the style of my bullet. Usually I just want to have the bullet in a different color and size. I start from a duplicate of my body copy Character Style, by choosing Duplicate Style... from the contextual menu after (right) clicking the body copy style in the Characters Style panel.

2. Create a Bulleted List

Next, I select my text, and make it a Bulleted List which you can select from the Control bar at the top, or go to Type > Bulleted & Numbered Lists > Apply Bullets. Then I select my entire list, hit Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + T to evoke the Tabs panel and tweak things to my preference.

3. Create a Bulleted List Paragraph Style

Once the list is finished, I select it and create a new Paragraph Style for my list. Under the option Bullets & Numbering, I first set the List Type to Bullets and then I select my bullet style I created before in the Character Style dropdown.

4. Create a Numbered List Paragraph Style

I also create a separate Paragraph Style for numbered lists by duplicating this style and setting the List Type to Numbers. One thing you have to keep in mind with numbered lists is that when you create a 2nd list, the numbering continues. To reset the numbering, (right) click into the list text to evoke the contextual menu and choose Restart Numbering. Hope you enjoyed this tip.

5. Different Spacing for the First and Last Bullet

You can use the Indents and Spacing section of the Paragraph Style dialog to specify Space Before and Space After. Use the option 'Space Between Paragraphs Using Same Style' to specify the space between the bulleted list items. For example, if Space Before is 6 pt, Space After is 8 pt, and Space Between is 0 pt, the bulleted list will have 6 pt before the 1st item, 8 pt after the last item and in between the bulleted list items, space will be 0 pt. Oh, and did you know you can also quickly remove the bullet style from a paragraph by just clicking into the paragraph and toggling the Bullet List icon button in the Control panel (at the top right)?

6. Glyphs as Bullets & Nested Lists

One of the lists I had to create was one with checkboxes. To change each bullet into a checkbox, I created a separate Character Style first where I used Minion Pro as type face since that font has the checkbox as glyph. Then I created a separate Paragraph Style and selected the 'checkbox' glyph as Bullet Glyph under Bullets and Numbering, and as Character Style I selected the style I created for the checkbox. Then there was the task of a 2nd level list, a nested list. Here I added a second Paragraph Style with an increased left indent. So for multi-level lists you need to create a Paragraph Style for each level.