From the course: InDesign Secrets
220 Placing paragraph lines for emphasis - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
220 Placing paragraph lines for emphasis
- Sometimes, a design calls for placing a line along the left or right side of a paragraph, often for emphasis, or to indicate that something in the paragraph has changed. But In Design doesn't have that kind of feature. It can't just draw a vertical line along the side of a paragraph. However, there are a number of ways to fake it. For example, you could use a really thick rule above or rule below. Or you could put the paragraph inside of a table cell, or something like that. But all of those hacks have serious consequences. For example, with those hacks, you can't split a paragraph across two columns, or two pages, and even worse, you can't turn it into a paragraph style. That is a problem. But now, in In Design CC, there's a new option, using paragraph shading. In Design's paragraph shading feature is awesome, because it lets you put a colored box behind any paragraph. For example, this paragraph here, the second paragraph in my story. It has a purple, or lavender box behind it. But the thing about paragraph shading is, it doesn't just have to be behind the paragraph. You can actually put it anywhere you want. Even outside the text frame. Let me show you how. I'm going to switch to the type tool by double clicking on this paragraph. Now, I'm going to zoom into 200% by pressing cmd + 2 on the Mac, or ctrl + 2 on Windows. You can see my text cursor flashing inside that paragraph. So now I'm going to open the paragraph shading dialogue box. And I can find that by going to the control panel menu. That's way over here, on the right side of the control panel, up here in the upper right corner of the screen. When I click on that, I can scroll down here to paragraph shading. This is how I applied that paragraph shading to start with. I'll choose that, and let's move this out of the way just a little bit. And I want to make sure the preview check box is turned on in the lower left corner of the dialogue box. That preview check box let's me see the changes as I make them. I also want to make sure that this little link icon in the middle of the offset section is unlinked, it's unchained. When that's turned on, then all four of these fields have to be exactly the same. But, I want it unchained, so that I can change each field independently. Okay, now let's turn this into a line, instead of a box. First, I'll change the left offset. I'm going to set this to, say, 1p6. Of course, you could use centimeters, or millimeters, or inches, or whatever you're comfortable with. Now, when I press the table key to jump to the next field, you'll see it change on the page. The left edge of that box moved outside of the frame. Now, let's change the right offset. I'm going to make this a much larger value. But I'm going to make it negative, like -19p. That means move the right edge of that box to the left 19p. I chose that number because I know that the column width here, that text column, is a little bit less than 19p. Now, when I press the tab key again, you'll see that it moved it all the way over to the left. It's outside of the frame, and now it look like a line, a thick line, instead of a box. You'll also see a little bit of purple down here, underneath that paragraph, that's just a screen redraw problem, that's not really there. In fact, let's try and get rid of that, by changing the top and bottom offsets to zero. There we go. The last thing I'm going to do is change the tint from 30% to 100%. Just to make that line stand out better. I'll click okay, and you can see we're done. I put a big, thick purple line along the left edge of that paragraph. Of course, once you spend that much time formatting a paragraph, you want to make sure that you save it as a paragraph style. So I'll come over here to my dock, open the paragraph styles panel, and I'm going to save this as a new paragraph style. I'll call this Body With Line. You can call it anything you want, of course. And, I'm going to turn on the apply style to selection check box. When I click okay, it makes the paragraph style, and applies it to this paragraph. Okay, now let's apply this to some more paragraphs. I'll zoom out to fit the page in window, by pressing cmd + 0, or ctrl +0 on Windows. And I'll choose another paragraph, perhaps this paragraph down here. I'll just select some text inside that paragraph, And then click on the body with line paragraph style. And boom, I have my line. I love that. And of course, one of the best parts about the paragraph shading feature, is that it can span across more than one column, or even across threaded text frames. For example, I'll place my cursor down here, in this paragraph, at the bottom of the first column. I'll click on the body with line paragraph style, and now you'll see that that thick line shows up not just to the left of the paragraph, down here at the bottom of the first column. But also at the top of the second column, too. As you can see, this is a pretty cool feature. And yes, it does go to show that sometimes you have to think outside the box.
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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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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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