From the course: InDesign Secrets
184 Put a box around or behind a paragraph - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
184 Put a box around or behind a paragraph
- There are a handful of features that Microsoft Word can do easily that InDesign just can't, and the one that I hear questions about the most is paragraph boxes like this paragraph up here at the top of this column or this paragraph down here with the blue background. How the heck do you do those in InDesign? Unfortunately, there's no button, or check box, or effect that you can apply. Instead, you have to create these manually, and I generally make them in one of two ways. If the paragraph is a single line like this ANIMATION heading up here or this DRAWING & APPLIED ARTS down there, then I use paragraph rules. Let me show you how. I'll double click on this to switch to the Type tool and place my cursor inside that paragraph. Then in the control panel flyout menu way over here on the right side, I can choose Paragraph Rules. When I apply my paragraph rule like this, I can use a Rule Above or a Rule Below, doesn't really matter. I'll use Rule Above, and I'll turn that rule on by clicking on this check box. Now I want to make this a big thick rule, usually slightly larger than the type size itself. So I'll choose 9 points here. I also want to set the color of the rule to something other than the text itself. I'll say Magenta. Now to see what I'm doing, I'll turn on the Preview check box. I can look down here and I can see my rule. That's looking pretty good, except that it's a little bit too high. I want to bring it down, so I can do that by changing the offset value. I'll just click this little down arrow button a couple of times, and that looks pretty good, - 2 points offset. Now the only problem that I see is that the left edge is a little bit too close to the left edge of the text. So I'm going to do the same thing with a left indent, going to from 0 to -2 points. That pulls it back outside of the column a little bit. Now I'll click OK, and finally I'm going to change that to white text so it looks knocked out of the magenta. I'll triple click to select the entire paragraph, and up here in the control panel I'll choose Paper. That looks much better. Okay, paragraph rules work pretty well if you only have one or two lines, but what if you have a whole paragraph like this blue box over here? How do you do that? Well there are several ways to do it, but the way I like the most is to use a one cell table. Really, make it a table with only one cell. For example, I'll come over here and choose this paragraph, but I want to be careful not to select the invisible caricature at the very end. I'm only selecting up to that period, not the final invisible character. Now I'll go to the Table menu and choose Convert Text to Table. I don't have to worry about this dialogue box at all, I just click OK. And there you go. It's a table with only a single cell in it, and that cell contains the paragraph. I could apply formatting to that cell in all the normal ways, but I already have one over here that's formatted. So I'm going to click inside that cell and hit the escape key to select the cell instead of the text inside of it. Then I'm going to go to the Window menu, come down to Styles, and choose Cell Styles. I want to make a cell style of that formatting. So I'm going to choose New Cell Style from the panel menu. I'll give it a name. I'll call it paragraph box. And you can see that all the styling that was applied to that cell has been sucked up into this dialogue box. So I don't have to worry about any of these settings on the left. I just click OK. The last thing I need to do is apply it to that cell that I took it from. There we go. Now I can apply it to this cell as well by simply clicking inside of it and then clicking the cell style. It's as simple as that. The biggest problem with making these boxes as single cell tables is that they cannot break across columns or pages. That is, you can't have half the paragraph in one column and the second half of the paragraph in the next column. That's just the limitation of doing these kinds of boxes. Personally, I'm really hoping that Adobe's going to add a proper paragraph boxes feature into InDesign before too long, but in the meantime, it's nice to know that you can do it with these two techniques.
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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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