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.