he Tabs panel ruler where you want the tab to be. For instance, put the first tab at ½ inch. Nothing will change.
Put the second tab at about 1.25 inches. The words that have accumulated two tabs, Dog and Bird, will move to that new second tab.
Put the third tab at about 2 inches. Put the fourth tab at about 3 inches. All of the words will instantly align with the tab they are looking for. They will go exactly where you tell them.
Notice that as you manually set a tab marker, the default and invisible markers every half-inch to the left disappear (they remain every half-inch to the right of the last manual tab marker). You can tell they are no longer in place because tabbed text doesn’t stop there.
Continue to experiment: Select both paragraphs, and drag the tab markers left and right; watch everything follow along. Hit Enter and type another line of four animals; adjust the tabs if necessary.
- You can remove extra tabs in the text just as if the tabs were characters.
One reason why tabs can be so confusing is that not only are the default tab markers in the ruler invisible, but the characters in the text are invisible. As you saw in Step 3, you can “Show Hidden Characters” to see them.
Even when you cannot see the actual tab characters, you can remove them just as if they were letters. If you had typed three periods in front of the words “James Clifton,” you know how to delete those periods. In exactly the same way, you can delete tab characters.
Task 4 Delete tabs from the text
- Create a text frame about four or five inches wide.
- Hit the Tab key three times, then type James Clifton. Hit the Tab key two more times, then type Ryan Nigel.
Click to set the insertion point in front of James Clifton. Drag a wee bit to the left, just enough to select the chunk of tab. You will notice that you cannot select only a portion of that tab character—it’s all or nothing.
- Hit the Delete key. Watch how James Clifton now goes to the second tab he can find. When you delete one tab from James, notice that Ryan also has one less tab; he now goes to the fourth tab he can find.