211 Tips and tricks for paragraph shading

- One of the most requested features for InDesign was finally added in CC 2015, and that is the ability to put blocks of color behind paragraphs that travel with the paragraph and that if the paragraph breaks in between columns, the box still stays behind there. In InDesign CC 2015, we call this Paragraph Shading. It's a paragraph attribute that you can find in the Control Panel menu right here and it's also available in Paragraph Styles. So if I want to edit this paragraph style, I could add Paragraph Shading to the style itself.

I'm going to show you a couple tips and tricks that I've picked up in the short time that this new feature has been available as I record this. First, to apply Paragraph Shading, you select the paragraphs and then choose Shading, turn it on, like paragraph rules, above or below. So, I'm going to select these first three paragraphs right here. Let me zoom in a little bit so it's easier to see and I'll give you a quick little side tip, which is instead of having to dig around for Paragraph Shading dialog box, I usually use Quick Apply to get there quickly. And we've talked about Quick Apply in a bunch of other tips and also in our regular InDesign titles, that on a Mac you press Command + Return, on Windows: Control + Enter, and you'll get Quick Apply.

You can see that I've been using this. All you do is start typing in the word shading and as soon as you get to shad, Quick Apply finds that menu command. You can see it's highlighted. And then you just press Return or Enter, and it opens up the dialog box. Isn't that nice? All right, so let's turn on Shading here and we'll leave everything at the default and discuss. Well actually, let me change the tint to something a little easier on the eyeballs. Okay, so what I actually want to happen here is I want to get this lavender background behind this entire section, so that as I type, the background or box or shading, whatever you want to call it, travels with it.

But what I don't like is this white space in between the paragraphs and that's because paragraph shading is designed to start at the top of the ascenders of the first line of text. So at the top of the capital T, for example. And it is designed to end the color at the bottom of the descenders of the last characters in the line. So there is the bottom, the Y, and that's where it's stopping. What we need to do is force it to add more space above and below and we do that in the Shade dialog box, Paragraph Shading.

So I'll press Command + Return again and it's still remembering my last command. Just hit Return one more time. What we need to do is set offsets. I'm going to just set top and bottom offsets. I don't want to affect left and right, so I'll unclick the chain icon. And I'll click in the top offset and just tap on my up arrow on my keyboard, this is that cool tip that works in every field in InDesign that requires a number entry and I have added some top. And then on the bottom, I'll also increase the bottom.

There you go. So I've removed the extra spacing between here and I did it just by selecting those first couple paragraphs. I could have selected the entire selection. So you just do this by eyeball and again, this can be saved in a paragraph style. Let's look at another special case. I'll click OK here. And we'll scroll over to the right. Here I have some text that's not in a rectangular frame. The edges have been rounded. Let's zoom out and see what that looks like. All right, so it's a letter to the editor, signed by this person.

I want to put this entire letter with a paragraph shade behind it. I'm going to select all the text and then open up the Paragraph Shading dialog box, turn on Shading. I guess I have already been working with this. It's set to 10%. And I can see that it's not going to the edges of the frame, so I'm going to increase the offsets and I'll just increase all of them at the same time. Now we have this problem of the shading going beyond the curve and that's when this guy comes into play: Clip To Frame.

You want to turn on Clip To Frame when you don't want the shading to extend beyond the boundaries of the text frame. That looks kind of cool. And then we're going to snap it up to get rid of this empty space here by just double clicking the bottom handle, there we go. Let's look at it in preview. Now you might be wondering why didn't I just apply a background behind a text frame. Because this way is more fun. One last tip I want to show you, let's go back to Normal mode. Let's say that we want to do a pull quote.

Let me get rid of the paragraph shading behind these paragraphs first. So I'll turn off Shading. Let's say that we want to turn this into a pull quote. It's really great to be able to use paragraph shading to create quick pull quotes. Now, I've already create a paragraph style that does that, called Pull Quote 2, and I'll apply it, look at that. What does this Pull Quote do? Let me open up to edit it and obviously, it changes the font.

It's reversed. It's larger. It's heavier. But look under Paragraph Shading is that I turned Shading on and in order to get it to move in from the text frame, because normally it goes from edge to edge, you use a negative left and right indent, similar to how you use a negative indent on a paragraph rule. So it goes up and below the text a little bit, and then left and right, there's a negative indent. Quick and easy way to create a pull quote that travels with the text that looks quite different from the text that doesn't involve anchored frames, I love it.