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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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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