This is a small guide showing a workaround I often use when styling poetry. Often you want the text to have an indent, but if the text breaks you want the remaining lines to have a bigger indent.
An example of how poetry could be indented, and the base of this small guide.
As you know, InDesign gives you 4 different ways of defining indents: Left indent, First Line Indent, Right Indent and Last Line Indent.
The 4 ways of indenting text in InDesign.
Unfortunately it doesn't have a Indent of all lines except the first, but that is easy to "work around". Instead you want to define how much you want your second, tertiary ... line indented as the Left Indent, and give the First Line Indent a negative value defining how much you want your first line "pulled back out".
In my case I want the first line to be indented by 12pt and the rest by 24pt, so the values I have typed in are 24pt as left indent, and -12pt as first line indent.
Illustrating the result.
