Indenting Challenge

[Scott Rossi]

Hi List:

Was hoping someone here might have some uncanny insight into how to solve a
text formatting dilemma...

Basic problem: I need to create two levels on indenting in a block of text,
but the text needs to always be directly editable and may span multiple
lines.

About a month or so back I mentioned an app I was working on that was sort
of a poor man's PowerPoint, and was trying to mimic the bullet formatting
one can apply to text.  I've been asked to implement two levels
bulleting/indenting, something like the following (hope it comes across):

€ Main Bullet Item 1 that spans
   multiple lines
€ Main Bullet Item 2
   - Secondary Bullet 1
   - Secondary Bullet 2 which
      spans multiple lines
   - Secondary Bullet 3
€ Main Bullet Item 3

I can accomplish the first level bullet/indenting using a combination of
margins and firstIndent, but I can't figure out a way to handle second
level.  To date I've been using HTMLtext and non-breaking spaces to pad the
secondary level lines, but arbitrarily adding spaces to live editable text
is messy, and I can't find a way to align a padded+wrapped line with the
line above it.  It occurred to me maybe there's some non-typeable,
non-selectable character I could use for padding, but I only know of
formFeed/lineFeed characters which wouldn't help here.

And the thing that really makes this difficult is the fact that the text
needs to be directly editable by users (cannot be in a locked field).

Any suggestions on how I might tackle this?

Thanks & Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design