Adobe InDesign Tips: Advanced Paragraph Rules
Compounding paragraph rules and mixing in a couple of nested styles in InDesign lets us create a paragraph style for headings, that has a rule that runs from the end of the text to the end of the column.
Posted on 2004-09-12 03:44 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
I was working on my CV recently, and was making it in Adobe InDesign. It has quite a bit of text, and I wanted it to fit on one page. A CV has different sections, like Education, Experience, Interests and so on, and with all the ragged lines the section titles kind of disappeared. So I wanted to add paragraph rules to make it easier for potential employees to read.
But I didn’t want your standard rules below the heading. I’ve done that before, and after all, I am a graphic designer, so I’d like them to be a little less normal—vertically centered in relation to the text. Here’s how it turned out:
I’m not claiming this is original, because most likely countless others have done it before me. But I did it in a way that saved myself (and now you!) the manual work of drawing lines, adjusting their lengths and moving them as the text shifts if it’s edited.
How, do you ask? Well, you’re in luck, because I’m going to tell you, in a hopefully easy to follow step-by-step article! We start with the basics, and create a paragraph style for the heading, using your choice of font, size and other settings.
Then for the first step of this trick, double-click the style in the Paragraph Styles palette to bring up the Style Options dialog box, and choose “Paragraph Rules” from the list on the left. Make sure the “Preview” box is checked, so you’ll be able to monitor the changes you’re about to make. Then choose “Rule Above” from the popup-box and check the “Rule On” box, and a rule should appear over the text, stretching all the way across the column. Adjust the “Offset” value so that the rule is positioned where you want it vertically. In this example, 1 mm (yes, it’s Metric, after all, I am Norwegian) seemed okay.
Second step is to remove the rule behind the text. We do this by turning on the rule below, setting its “Width” property to “Text”, making it thicker than the first rule, and setting it to the “Paper” color. (So the rule above isn’t really removed, just covered by a line the same as the background color. In other words, this trick won’t work on top of picture backgrounds, for example.) To better see what’s going on, it’s a good idea to use another color while fine-tuning the offset (vertical position), like I’ve done in the screenshot below, setting it to cyan.
The only thing left to do now is to make a space between the last character in the heading and the beginning of the line. There’s a problem here: InDesign won’t make rules with “Text” width go through trailing whitespace, so we employ the same trick here as we did with the second rule: Insert a character with its color set to the background color. At the same time we’ll reduce the amount of manual work necessary to accomplish this by using nested styles.
For this “faux space” character I chose to use a period. If you wish, you may choose something other than a period. (You might need to use periods in your headings or want a wider space, for example.) So, to put the finishing touch on this heading, add a period to the end of the heading.
Make a new character style, and set but one property, Character Color, to the same background color as the second rule—in this case, “Paper”. In this example, I called the style “Color: Paper”.
Go back to editing the heading style, now choosing “Drop Caps and Nested Styles” from the menu. Click on the “New Nested Style” button, and set it to ”[No character style] up to 1 .” by choosing “up to” from the popup menu, typing “1” in the next input field and a period in the last input field. Then add another nested style, set it to use the newly created character style and to go “through 1 Characters”—and presto! The period is invisible, and the style is done!
And for your enjoyment, here is the picture of the finished result again:
There are two limitations to this technique that I’ve come across so far. I’ve already mentioned the trouble with complex backgrounds—it just doesn’t work with those (unless you can get away with multiplying, for example, which would work nicely if both the text and the rule are black). The second problem is that if your heading extends over one line, you’ll get highly undesirable results—the Rule Above will go behind the top line, and the Rule Below will go behind the bottom line. Then again, if your headings are that long, they’re probably too long anyway.
So, there you have it—hope you enjoyed it!
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