I am trying to re-structure a 150 pp manuscript that is spread across 25 layers, by indenting and outdenting certain layers. Don’t know how.
Format > Paragraph > Increase/Decrease Indents leads to all grayed-out choices.
Add the Promote, Demote , Up and Down Arrow icons to your Main Toolbar via the bottom item in the View menu.
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The easiest way is to use the shortcuts Cmd-Ctl-left/right/up/down, which take the selected binder items and demote, promote, move up and down accordingly. They only work on documents when your focus is in the Binder.
If your focus is in the Editor, then the same commands demote/promote/up/down paragraphs and bullet items as well.
That’s why your menu items were grayed out – they only refer to paragraphs, not documents and you didn’t have the focus in the editor at the time. There are separate menu commands for promoting/demoting etc, which are only available when you’re in the Binder, but I can’t remember where they are because I always use the shortcuts!
Hope this helps.
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Those commands are located in the Edit ▸ Move ▸ submenu, and they are the same commands for moving index cards around in four directions, promoting, demoting and changing the order of items in the outliner and binder sidebar, and for changing the order of text lines as well as block adjusting their indent. The main indent commands in the Format menu are in fact synonyms of these commands.
Note that in the Windows version, my notes about how these commands are supposed to be the same no matter what context you use them in (whether that is true internally or not is not something the user should be aware of), were missed. They are supposed to all use the same four keyboard shortcuts, so that moving text around is exactly the same as moving items around, and you only have to memorise one modifier combination. But instead there are eight different shortcuts to set up in the Keyboard settings tab.
I would encourage changing four of those to match the other four (changing the item movement shortcuts will be best, since they use Ctrl+Arrow and that is a cursor movement shortcut. I find Ctrl+Alt+Arrows works well for both). It will complain about conflicts, but conflict warnings can be ignored when the context of the conflict is impossible for them to both be active at once (like a cursor in a text editor vs an index card selection).