How To Use A Hanging Indent In Pages On a Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to do a hanging indent in Mac Pages.

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So a lot of people search online to figure out how to do a hanging indent in Mac Pages. Once you know the trick it's pretty easy. But there are some variations that can be more useful than just the standard hanging indent. So let's take a deep dive into several ways to do it.

First let's look at a very basic hanging indent. You need to put your cursor somewhere in the paragraph. It could be before the first character. It could be at the end. You could select the entire thing. As long as the cursor is somewhere blinking in the paragraph. Then you want to go to Format and click on Layout. Here you'll see several different categories. Expand Indent, if it's not already expanded, and you'll see First, Left, and Right. If you increase the first number here you could see it does a standard indent. It indents the very first line. You could set that to whatever you want or to zero to have it flush left.

Likewise the right side makes a right indent. You would think the left would actually do the same thing as the right and move all of the lines over to the right. But in fact it doesn't. It's exactly what we want. If we increase the left side you could see it does all the lines except the first one. So this first number here, that takes care of the first line. Left takes care of all the other lines. So to do a simple hanging indent all we need to do is increase the left number. Now you could set this to whatever you want. These arrows here will do it in ¼ inch increments. But you could select the text here to 0.4 for instance, to have four tenth's of an inch.

Now you can also go to View and then Show Ruler, or Command R. You can see rulers here at the top and there are three blue indicators. You have these triangles pointing down and they represent the Right and Left numbers. You have this T shaped indicator here that indicates the First. So if I move the First over to the right you can see that move. If I move the Left over you can see that move. You can grab these and drag them wherever you want. Now when you move the Left one it will also move the First one with it. But you can then move the First one independently to place that separate from the Left. 

So there's your basic handing indent. But if you're going to want to use this more than one time in your document you're going to want to create a Style for it. So here I've got the cursor in this first paragraph and if you look under Format at the top it shows me I'm using the Body style and there's an asterisk next to it showing it's a variation of the Body style. All the other paragraphs show Body with no asterisk and this one shows an asterisk. That's because this one has the indenting there and these others don't. That's the difference between these two styles.

Now I don't have this saved as a style anywhere. So I can save it to reuse in other paragraphs very easily by going over here and not clicking on Update. If I click on Update it will update all of the paragraphs using Body style to use this specific style. Watch what happens. You can see I get hanging indents for all the paragraphs. I'm going to Undo that. Instead of doing Update I'm going to click the little Reveal button here and I'm going to hit + and create a new style, Body 1. I'll call it Body With Hanging Indent. Now I have a second style here that I can use somewhere else. If I go down to this paragraph, say, I can click here and do Body With Hanging Indent and that one has a hanging indent but not the second paragraph. 

The advantage of doing it that way is that I can go here and say that's a little bit too much of an indent. I'm going to change that to 0.3. Now I've changed it and you can see it's Body With Hanging Indent with an asterisk next to it. If I hit Update not only does it update that style but it updates the other paragraphs using that style. So if I use this a hundred times in my document I have an easy way to change the amount of the hanging indent throughout the document in one go.

Now I know some of you are saying, but Gary what I really want to do is have a hanging indent in my footnotes or end notes because I need to have it match a certain style. If I add a footnote like for instance I'll add a footnote here, Insert Footnote, and now I've got that footnote there at the bottom. If I add some text like that to it you can see it doesn't have the hanging indent that you may want in a footnote. Well, you can do the same thing here. You can see this is using the Footnote style. If I were to go to Format, Text, and then Indent and then change the Left indent you could see I could have this indented here on the left. Then if I hit Update it will update to Footnote style. So all my future footnotes will use the same thing.

So I can insert another footnote here and instantly that footnote will follow that style because the footnote style now has a hanging indent. As a bonus is if you put the cursor just before the first word in the footnote and insert a Tab then the first line will line up with the rest of the lines in the footnote as well.

Now let's look at a little bit of a variation here. A lot of times what we want to do is we want to have the hanging indent because we want something before it. Like for instance a number. So I can do like number 1, like that, and I want it to stick out. So I could do a hanging indent and have the one stick out. But it's not always going to lineup evenly and it would be nice to actually have the first real word in this paragraph lineup with the rest here. So what I want in that case is not a hanging indent at all. I want to use a bullet list or, in this case, a numbered bullet list.

I'm going to go to Style here on the right. I'm going to go to Bullets & Lists and select Numbered. You could see now not only does it put a number before the paragraph but it lines up the rest of the text to the left side. So I could look here and I can see the Indent. The first number for the indent is the complete left side here. The second number, where it says Text, is just the indentation for the text. So this could be really handy. I could use something besides the number. I could use, for instance, a bullet and have a bullet there and I could still adjust this. So if your intention was to actually have a number or a bullet there instead of a real hanging indent then you really want to use Bullets & Lists.

Here's a really advanced technique. I can go even further than this and have words here instead of using bullets. How would I do that? Well, let's go and select all three paragraphs here and set them all to a standard Bullet list there like that. Let's say instead of a dot here I wanted there to be a word. So the first thing I'm going to need is more space. So select these three paragraphs here and I will change it so the text indents quite a bit. Like that much. We've got these bullets out here. Now I want to replace them with a word but not the same word for each one. 

So I'm going to put my cursor here in the first paragraph. I don't need to put it over here. As a matter of fact I can't. I'm going to select this first paragraph or any place inside of it. Then I'm going to go to Bullet & Lists. I need to make sure I select Text Bullets here. Now I can set the text for the bullet. You can see it's set there to be that little bullet character. I can change it to anything I want like an X, for instance. You can see it changes it to an X. I can also change it to a whole word. So I can change it to something like This. Then I can click on any part in the second paragraph and change it to That. Then I can select over here and change it to yet another thing, Other. 

Now I've got different words here that can stand by themselves and the rest of the text is all lined up. This is a handy technique. But note that if you select all these paragraphs and try to change anything, like the word or the indenting, it's going to then make them all fit the same style. So if I move in the text indent you see it changes all to This rather than This, That, and Other. So I need to change each paragraph on its own. This is a little bit of a pain but it does create a nice effect that could be useful in many situations.

Another way to do the same thing is to add a text box. Take that text box and set it up here to the left side. Shrink it. Put whatever text you want in it.Then make sure under Format, Arrange that you set the Text Wrap to something like Automatic or one of these other ones to fit in. Have it set to Move With Text. Also set spacing down probably to nothing for this since you could just use the box itself for spacing. You can also go to Text, Layout, and change the Text Inset to zero. That makes it a lot easier to lineup with things. If I were to move this, say, to the second paragraph here I could shrink it to whatever I want. Make this as long as I want to make sure it pushes all the text in. Then I could, since it's set to Move With Text here, if I were to insert some text you could see how it pushes the box down with the rest. Although sometimes you have to line it up a little bit after a movement it will at least stay with the paragraph that it's kind of attached to.

There are even more ways to do it. You can get creative with columns. You can have a very short column on the left and a large column on the right. You can use a column break to put some content on the left and the rest on the right. You can just use text boxes for everything. So a text box for the left side but also a text box for the main text on the right. Just figure out which of these methods works best for what you're doing.