Double Indenting

The Double Indent tip is quite an old one that I’m happy to have used for a long time. Thanks, Allen. Time for me to give something useful back.

The following is my Double Indent variation for a somewhat different purpose.
When I create user manuals, I sometimes use special styles to place a visually striking “note box” centered between the margins. There is a default width, but I use my Double Indent macro (attached to a toolbar button) to gradually increase or decrease the margins for the most esthetic arrangement.

My toolbar includes a Note Bar style, a Note style, and my variation of the Double Indent macro, which is included below. My button icons are custom ones I created as visual mnemonics. The attached graphic shows my toolbar and a set of indents to demonstrate the process.

I create my note bar as a paragraph with the word “Note” (or sometimes “Tip”) and apple my Note Bar style, which has default symmetric left and right indents, left alignment, 0 space after, and blue shading. My character formatting is Arial Black in upper case, but that’s just my preference.
I create my note text as a paragraph (or multiple paragraphs) and apple my Note style, which has the same default left and right indents, left alignment, 0 space before, and a lighter blue shading. I apply any direct bold or italic formatting if appropriate.

I select my Note Bar AND the Note text, and click my Double Indent toolbar button, either by itself to increase both indents by a specific amount, or while holding a Ctrl key to decrease the indents by the same amount. In my macro, my increment/decrement is 7.2 pts (a tenth of an inch) and the maximum margins are 144 pts (2 inches), but you can substitute whatever sizes you prefer.

But how do you get the toolbar button click to be sensitive to the Ctrl key state? There is a special library function to detect the key state for the Ctrl key (and the Shift key, too, for extra combinations and possibilities). You must declare this function in the main body of your macro set, outside of the other functions. In my Normal.dot template, I include it at the top, above my other macros.

In the figure below, you can see the first note box with default indents is out of balance. With each toolbar button click the box width shrinks. The second box looks pretty good, but I go farther just to see if anything else looks better. The third box has a few orphan words. Try again. The fourth box has a one word widow that isn’t in bold. Again. The fifth box has the first line all bold and the second line is the same length. Nice, but the third line is bad. One more try. Ugh! Hold CTRL and click the button until it gets back to the second box arrangement, which is the most esthetic.

(see Figure 1 below)

Declare Function GetKeyState Lib "user32" (ByVal nVirtKey As Long) As Integer
Const VK_SHIFT As Integer = &H10 'SHIFT
Const VK_CONTROL As Integer = &H11 'CTRL


Sub DoubleIndent()
' Increase or decrease the paragraph indent symmetrically, both left and right
' Increment/decrement by tenths of an inch (7.2 pts) to 2 inches max / zero min
' To increase the indent, call the function normally (click the toolbar button).
' To decrease the indent, hold either CTRL key while clicking the toolbar button.
' Adapted on 2011/5/23 for increasing the indent from WordTips by Sharon Parq Associates
' Modified - 2011/6/27 to enable decreasing the indent, too.
' Requires (module) declaration of the GetKeyState user32 library function.

Dim Indnt As Single, Lindt As Single, Rindt As Single

Indnt = 7.2
If GetKeyState(VK_CONTROL) < 0 Then Indnt = Indnt * -1
Lindt = Selection.ParagraphFormat.LeftIndent
Rindt = Selection.ParagraphFormat.RightIndent
Lindt = Lindt + Indnt
If Lindt < 0 Then Lindt = 0
If Lindt > 144 Then Lindt = 0
Rindt = Rindt + Indnt
If Rindt < 0 Then Rindt = 0
If Rindt > 144 Then Rindt = 0
Selection.ParagraphFormat.LeftIndent = Lindt
Selection.ParagraphFormat.RightIndent = Rindt
End Sub