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• • April 13, 2020 at 9:57 am #1237943
    Kryss Barick

    Member

    I don’t even know if I can describe what I am needing to do. I’ve been working with InDesign for many years, but this is the first time someone has really challenged my layout abilities.

    I need to create a style that will allow me to have a paragraph within a border and set as if it were a pull quote, but it is actually a part of the inline text, and not pulled out of it and duplicated. This box will need to be able to auto size depending on the amount of text in the paragraph. It will need to be anchored at the top and left edge, and retain a given width, but allowed to expand to the bottom.

    I know that I can do this manually, but this will repeated in each “chapter” of the book. Also, this will be an ongoing project, with multiple books produced each year in different languages. Doing this manually will nearly double the amount of time needed to produce each book, and there is no way I can meet my deadlines if I have to do this manually.

    I have spent hours in several forums and on Lynda.com looking for an answer, but have come up empty. I have exhausted all my resources and am hoping someone on here will be able to help me.

    Thank you in advance.

  • April 13, 2020 at 3:20 pm #1238035
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    It would help if you could post an example image of what it should look like. You can’t upload here, but you can post it in dropbox or Imgur or another file upload site, and then post the link here.

    Normally I would just do this with the Paragraph Shading or Paragraph Border feature.
    https://indesignsecrets.com/applying-seamless-shading-consecutive-paragraphs.php

    Alternatively, you could anchor a text frame inside another frame and use Auto-Size in the Text Frame Options dialog box to let it expand/contract.
    https://indesignsecrets.com/tag/auto-size

  • April 14, 2020 at 7:22 am #1238245
    Kryss Barick

    Member

    First, I want to say thank you very much for the quick reply. I really didn’t expect to get a response the same day, much less from Mr. InDesign himself! I love your work on Lynda.com. I know if anyone can resolve this, you can.

    I have created a link and attached it below. I need the text in the box to flow out from the paragraph it is wrapped in and into the section headed by the “LESSON EXPOSITION.”

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/r3oa6omr7iu5ilp/Sample%20File.indd?dl=0

    Thanks again.

  • April 14, 2020 at 8:13 am #1238265
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Hi Kryss, glad my work has been helpful for you! Well, there’s probably no good way to “flow” that text in and out of the box in this situation, where the box has text wrap around it. But you could make the text frame (the little one, with the Golden Nugget in it) a single text frame with a stroke, text insets (to push the text away from the stroke on the inside), and Auto-Size (to make it grow or shrink as necessary.

    That should make it faster/easier to lay out, though I’m not sure if it’ll fix everything for you.

  • April 14, 2020 at 8:38 am #1238275
    Kryss Barick

    Member

    I greatly appreciate your help in this situation. I was afraid this might be a problem. But with that being the case, I can take this information back to the one who asked for it and tell her that this is not feasible given my schedule. I believe that she will be okay with the paragraph shading inline instead of wrapped with an outline. If this was a single book with a distant deadline I wouldn’t hesitate to do this manually. But this is a very small portion of my recurring workload.

    Like I said, if you can’t do it, no one can.

    I thank you so much for all that you do!

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