Lining up a numbered list on the period following the number

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GrahamF
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Joined: 2017-10-02 00:13:36

Lining up a numbered list on the period following the number

Post by GrahamF »

I thought I would try lining up the numbers in a Numbered List so they would line up on the period, not the first number of the item. i.e. right justification instead of left justification, as explained on page 54 of the User's Guide. I found that ALL lists in my document were altered (not even successfully), not just the one I had highlighted. Is this normal behaviour? Change one, change them all? I have not yet upgraded to High Sierra, and am using NWP 2.1.7 on a brand new iMac.

Any suggestions? TIA.
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martin
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Re: Lining up a numbered list on the period following the nu

Post by martin »

GrahamF wrote:I found that ALL lists in my document were altered (not even successfully), not just the one I had highlighted. Is this normal behaviour? Change one, change them all?
That is the expected behavior. List items in your text are controlled via List Styles, which work like other styles (eg: paragraph styles). If you change some aspect of the list style (eg: the alignment, number format, etc) then all paragraphs using that list style will be updated automatically. To get back to the paragraph styles analogy: if you apply bold to your "Heading 1" paragraph style, it's expected that all headings using that style will now appear in bold.

If you truly need unique list settings for a single block of text in your document you have two options:
1. Create a new list style just for this purpose, eg: create a new list style called "Right-Aligned Numbered List".
2. Apply formatting overrides to that block of text to enforce your customized settings. For example, you can use the ruler to manually adjust the list item indents for those paragraphs. This technique doesn't work for all settings, because some settings cannot be controlled in such a way. Your situation is one such case: there is no way to control the list item alignment using paragraph formatting overrides.

You did say "not even successfully", so it sounds like maybe you had trouble right-aligning your list items? One common cause of problems is not having enough space reserved for the list numbers. If there's not enough space to fit the list number itself, then automatic tabbing will occur, often disrupting the alignment. Make sure both the "text" and "item" indents provide enough space:
indents.png
indents.png (66.26 KiB) Viewed 5277 times
I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions.
GrahamF
Posts: 8
Joined: 2017-10-02 00:13:36

Re: Lining up a numbered list on the period following the nu

Post by GrahamF »

Thanks, Martin. I've never really tried custom Styles before and assumed it works like change the font for a selected block of text. I've followed your example and instructions with success. Thanks again.
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martin
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Re: Lining up a numbered list on the period following the nu

Post by martin »

Ah great, I'm glad you got it all working Graham, thanks for letting us know. I was very happy to help!
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