Paragraph indents. A new palette in the text toolbar sets a paragraph's left indent, right indent
and first line indent, in millimetres, for whichever paragraph the cursor is in — no need to
select the text first. Select across several paragraphs and all of them take the value.
The first line indent is an offset from the left indent and can be negative, which pulls that
line out to the left of the rest of the paragraph. That is the hanging indent a bulleted or
numbered list is built from, and it is why these three settings come first.
Text can have its own line join, separate from the frame's border. The join control used to edit
one value for both: setting a frame's corners to round rounded its outlined letters too, and there
was no way to have one without the other. With the cursor in the text it now sets the join for the
text — for the selection if there is one, otherwise for the whole frame — and outside the text it
sets the border's corners as it always did.
Text that has never been given a join of its own still follows the frame's border, so nothing
already designed changes. This replaces the arrangement described in the 2026-08-27 notes, where
the frame's border join was the text's join with no way to separate them.
Bulleted and numbered lists. Two buttons in the text toolbar turn the paragraph the cursor is in
into a bulleted or a numbered list, and clicking the active one turns it back off. A paragraph is
one or the other or neither, never both.
Numbering counts the way InDesign does. Each level counts on its own; a paragraph at a shallower
level starts the deeper ones again; a list carries on across separate blocks of text at the same
level; and changing the format part way through — decimal to roman, say — renumbers nothing, it
only changes how the same count is written.
Five number formats: 1, 2, 3; I, II, III; i, ii, iii; A, B, C; and a, b, c.
The toolbar offers the two buttons and nothing else this time. Level, number format, start-again
number and marker alignment are all carried and all honoured, but they arrive from a converted
document rather than from a control — the panel for editing them is a later release.
The marker sits in the paragraph's hanging indent, which is why indents came first. The space the
first line hangs out by is the space the bullet or number is drawn in, and the alignment setting
places it within that. A paragraph with no hang gets just enough room made for the marker instead,
so a list never prints over its own text.
Documents converted from InDesign now arrive as lists. The type, level, start number, whether it
continues, the format and the alignment all come across, along with the bullet character from the
document's own settings — which is stored once for the whole document rather than on the
paragraphs, so nothing carried it before.
Documents converted from InDesign now keep the indents they were designed with. Left, right and
first line indent were read and thrown away on every import before this, so a paragraph that hung
or sat inset in InDesign arrived flush against the frame with nothing to say it had ever been
otherwise.
Fixed in this release
A paragraph could lose its formatting when a document was reopened. Settings held on the
paragraph rather than on the text — and, from this release, the indents — were dropped on load
unless the document had been written by a version that recorded them in a particular way. Text
stroke alignment set on a paragraph was the case that showed it.
Paragraph settings are read inside table cells. A paragraph in a cell was treated as carrying no
style and no settings of its own, so anything set on the paragraph rather than on the characters
had no effect there. Only the drop cap was affected before now, and only when set per paragraph
rather than for the whole frame, which is why it had gone unnoticed.
Typograph developers notes
An indent belongs to the paragraph, not to the selected characters, so the palette appears while
editing text and writes through a new paragraph-level path rather than the one that splits
character runs at the selection. A frame that overflows into linked frames is handled at the
chain root, like every other text edit.
A stored document keeps the layout it was saved with. PDFs are generated from that stored layout,
so an existing template renders unchanged until it is opened and saved again, and an already
converted template keeps its missing indents until it is converted afresh.
Indents apply inside table cells as they do in a frame, measured from the cell's own text edge.
This needed the fix above: a cell's text is laid out by its own composer, which was never handed
the means to resolve paragraph settings.
InDesign's other paragraph offsets — space before, space after, space between paragraphs of the
same style, and last line right indent — are not carried yet. They move a paragraph vertically
rather than horizontally, which is a different piece of the layout, and they are a follow-up.
The text join resolves in three steps: the run's own, then the frame's text join, then the frame's
border join. The border on the end is what keeps older documents identical — it is what text
followed unconditionally before either of the other two existed.
Text takes all three joins where a text stroke's alignment takes only two. A letter's outline is
an ordinary closed shape and corners like one; there is no equivalent of the inside alignment
InDesign will not put on text.
Nothing arrives from a conversion. InDesign has no join setting for text at all — its stroke panel
greys cap and join out — so an imported document has no text join and follows its border.
The PDF resolves the same three steps from the stored document, so a join change reaches generated
output as soon as the document is saved. It does not wait for a fresh layout, unlike the baseline
and indent changes above.
The counter follows six rules, and all six were read off a PDF InDesign exported from a document
written to test them, rather than worked out from the file format. The same document is replayed
by an automated test, so the day our numbering and InDesign's disagree, that test says which.
A marker is drawn text, not typed text. It is in no story, cannot be selected, and the cursor
cannot be put inside it. A drop cap looks like the same kind of thing and is not: its enlarged
letters really are the paragraph's first letters, taken out of the flow, so they can be selected
and counted like any others. A marker comes from the count and exists nowhere else, which is why
it is flagged for the PDF — anything matching drawn words back to the text they came from has to
skip it, or every word after it takes the styling of the one before.
Turning a list off keeps its level, format and start number. Turn it back on and it picks up
where it was, which is also what InDesign does with the settings it leaves on a paragraph.
Lists are not available inside table cells in this release. The buttons are greyed there. A cell
is the one place where the hanging indent has to compete with the cell inset and the column
width, and no document we convert asks for it.
Not carried, deliberately: named lists that share one count between several styles, a separate
font or character style for the marker alone, and custom marker templates. InDesign offers all
three; nothing in the documents we convert uses them, and each is a step up in complexity for
something no one has asked for.