Under Spacing, set Line spacing to "Double." Click OK, and these formatting rules will be applied to this paragraph and to every paragraph you type after it (assuming you don't change the formatting of a later paragraph). Under Indentation, set Special to "First line" and By to 0.5". Simply put the cursor on the line where you're going to start typing, then go the Home tab in the ribbon and click Paragraph to bring up the paragraph formatting dialog box.Īs you can see in the accompanying graphic, there are two important settings you'll want to apply to your paragraph. In Word 2010, you can do this very easily before you even start to type the first paragraph of your story. One of these rules should be that the first line of each paragraph gets automatically indented half an inch. This means defining a set of formatting rules that get applied to all paragraphs in your document. It's better to apply paragraph formatting to your document. Using the tab key inserts an actual invisible tab character into your text, which can mess up the formatting later when your publisher tries to reformat your document for publication. You can still use the tab key in your word processor, but that's not the best way to indent a paragraph. "Tab" is short for "tabular," because tab stops were useful for helping a typist arrange figures in tables. You could hit the space bar five times at the start of your first line, or you could set up a tab stop half an inch in from your left margin and just hit the tab key once. (see KB )īut there is another caveat on the virtual hanging indent - in RTF/DOC/WordML (note this rule does not apply to DOCX) the virtual hanging indent tab stop is used - if and only if - there are no tab stops set in the list, paragraph, or styles (list/paragraph style) after the virtual position.Back in the Stone Age, when we still used typewriters, there were two ways to indent a paragraph. One more thing - the use hanging tab only occurs in Word 2007+ (ie 2007, 2010 & later) - and it's the default in 2007+ which makes it sort of weird:įor Word xml file, the default behavior of Word 20+ is to omit the virtual hanging tab (If Word 2007+, we have an option to make Word enable the hanging tab)įor normal Word 2003 doc files opened in Word 2003, the virtual hanging tab is always omitted.įor normal Word 2003 doc files opened in Word 2007+, Word 2007+ will automatically set the option "Don't use hanging indent as tab stop for bullets and numbering" selected, and omit the hanging indention.įor normal Word 2007+ docx files opened in Word 2007+, Word 2007+ will use hanging indent as tab top for bullets and numbering by default.įor normal Word 2007+ docx files opened in Word 2003, Word 2003 will omit the virtual hanging tab, and therefore, may misaligned the document. You justify now so that it's always relative to the same tab stops. Then we just need to know what the next tab stop is.įor that, any tab stop after the end of the displayed level text is valid:Īny hanging indent (as long as the doNotUseIndentAsNumberingTabStop element §2.15.3.2 is not set)ĭefault tab stops at the distances set by the defaultTabStop element §2.15.1.24įinally, we justify the result - from start of the level text to end of the line. (Note: this is the default if suff is not set!) If it's space or nothing, add a space or nothing. Now, look at the suff element §2.9.30 to see what separates the bullet from the text. If the numFmt isn't "bullet", we need to replace the % syntax appropriately. Next, place the text in the lvlText element §2.9.12 at the location of the final left indent. If there is a then that tab is cleared and not only does not count as a tab, but clears out any parent tabs (style, list) that are at the same position.įirst, check the numFmt element §2.9.18 to see the format of any numbers in the list definition.
#WHERE IS THE FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD 2010 FULL#
Since tab stops are additive, we just gather them all up and we have the full set of tab stops There, it correctly states that the direct formatting (the pPr under the p element) supersedes the version in the list definition This is also posted at Indent Positioning in DOCX (where it has much better formatting than what I could do here).įirst, to get the final state of any property (including indents), we need to follow the style hierarchy rules in §2.7.2 of the specification