From the course: InDesign Secrets

166 Creating blank entry spaces on forms - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

166 Creating blank entry spaces on forms

- See this colored rectangle here? I put that there to help people figure out where to write their name. Now I want to do the same thing for all these other fields. But some are short, and some are long. Some might change in length if I later come back and edit the text. So what's the easiest way to make these colored boxes? Well, here's how I do it. I make a paragraph rule that shows up everywhere that the text is not. Here, let me show you what I mean. First I'm gonna turn off the preview by pressing the W key on my keyboard so you can see that this is actually a big table that I've created. Each one of these items is inside of a table cell. Now I'll double-click on this first piece of text to switch to the Type tool automatically. Now I'm gonna come over here and open my paragraph styles panel, and you can see that there's local formatting on top of it. That's that plus sign. I'll remove that by clicking on the Clear Overrides button. Now let's see how I made that paragraph rule so you can do it. I'll go to the Control Panel menu way over here in the upper right corner, and I'll choose Paragraph Rules. Now I'm gonna add a rule above, So I'll select Rule Above from this pop-up menu and choose Rule On. Let's make this a really big thick rule here, maybe 10 points. I'm gonna change the color of the rule to let's say this orange. It's a little bit too high. I'd like to bring it down from the baseline of the text. So let's change my offset to let's say -2 points. I just press the down key on my keyboard to move down by one point increments. This gives us a rule that takes up the entire column from the left margin to the right margin inside this cell. Now I'm going to also add a rule below, so I'll choose Rule Below from this pop-up menu and turn Rule On again. See you can have more than one rule on the same paragraph. This time I'm going to make my rule even larger, not 10 but maybe even 12 points. I'll change the color to something I can see better, like pink, and then I'm gonna change the offset to something really big, but minus big, like minus 10. Once again I just press the arrow keys on my keyboard to change that number. So now I have two rules, one on top of the other. But I want this rule, the pink one, to only to go as far as the text. Don't go all the way from one margin to the next, just the text itself. I change the width pop-up menu to text. Now you're starting to see how this tip's gonna work, right? The pink is knocking out the orange behind it, but I don't want it to be pink, I want it to be paper, or white. Now I don't like the way that orange is smooshed up against the E in that word, so I'm going to push it away by making the white rule a little bit wider. I'll do that by giving myself a Right Indent on this rule. I'll just press the arrow key down one so minus one. That looks pretty good. The last thing I'll do is go back to the rule above, and I'm gonna change the tint of this to something smaller, say 40 percent. And I'll press OK, or hit enter on my keyboard. Okay, so we've got one of them, and that looks pretty good. so let's make a paragraph style, so that we can quickly apply it to all the others. Inside my Paragraph Styles panel menu I'll choose New Paragraph style, and I'll give it a name, Table Width Rule. I'm gonna apply it to that selection, and click OK. Now all I need to do is select all the cells inside that table and apply my Paragraph Style, and we're done. I'll click over here so you can see that all of them now have that rule wherever the text is not. Of course the coolest thing here is that we can change the text at any time. So I'll remove this word Name here, and you'll see that it automatically updates, so that that orange rule gets a little bit larger. Also I could edit this Paragraph style just by double-clicking on it, and I can change the Paragraph rule to something different. For example, if that 40 percent tint is to large, I'll change it to 20 percent and it automatically updates. The more you can set things up as styles, like this Paragraph style, the more flexible your document will be. When you need to make changes it takes just a few clicks.

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