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.