A client who does a lot of financial study guides, and is a fairly recent Word to InDesign switcher, e-mailed me a bunch of “how do I” and “where is the” questions yesterday.
One thing that’s driving her crazy is InDesign’s lack of a Double Underline formatting option, which she needs to apply repeatedly to the last number before a sum total, also known as an “accounting underline:”
In Word, Command/Control-Shift-D adds a double underline under a selection, in InDesign, it opens and closes the Links panel. A search of the Help file proved fruitless, so she’s been hand-drawing a double underline (using the Line tool and the Thin-Thin line style) under instances of text that need it. Which means that she needs to adjust those repeatedly as the text flow changes. Yuck!
A better method in InDesign is to apply a custom underline, then save that as a Character Style (to which you can optionally assign a keyboard shortcut). If you add that style to InDesign’s default set of styles, then voila, you have a keyboard shortcut that applies a double underline in every document you create from then on.
Apply a Custom Underline
Select the text to which you want to apply a double underline and click the Underline button in the Control panel to apply the default single underline. In the screen shot below I’ve done so, and then deselected the text so you can see the underline more easily:
Keep the text selected — you might want to zoom in a fair amount as I’ve done — and open the Underline Options dialog box from the Control panel menu. (Or, just Option/Alt-click the Underline icon in the Control panel, which is a shortcut to the same dialog box.)
Turn on the preview checkbox in the dialog box so you can see the result of your settings as you modify them. You’ll want to change the line type to Thin-Thin (Thick-Thick is too much) to start with:
Underlines change their weight and offset relative to the size of the text they’re underlining, that’s what the measures in parentheses mean. For this 12-point text, though, the double-underline is barely visible. So increase both the weight (which increases the amount of space between the two thin lines, as well as the weight of the thin lines themselves) and the offset a bit until you’re satisfied:
When you’re done, click OK to close the dialog box.
Keep in mind that changing from an Auto to an absolute measure for the weight and offset means the underline will remain the same, even if you change the size of the type it’s underlining. If you’re going to turn this into a Character Style (next step), and you’ll be using the double-underline for significantly different sizes of type, you might want to re-do this step for each size, adjusting the weight and offset as appropriate, and create multiple Character Styles from them.
Minor variations are fine, though — one double underline works just as well for 10 pt. as it does for 12 pt. type, in my experience.
Make a Character Style with a Keyboard Shortcut
With the custom underlined text selected or your cursor blinking inside it, create a new Character Style by Option/Alt-clicking on the New Style icon at the bottom of the Character Style panel or by choosing New Character Style from the panel’s fly-out menu.
The resulting dialog box should show you that the new style “sucked in” the custom double underline formatting of the text surrounding the Type cursor (or the text selection), and only that formatting — not the typeface or color or anything else. (This means you can apply the style to any text and all it will do is apply the underline.) You can verify that by looking at the Style Settings summary area at the bottom.
Still in the General panel of the dialog box, name the style and give it a keyboard shortcut. Remember, InDesign has a special rule for style shortcuts. They need to include both a modifier key and a number from the keypad. So, we can’t assign “Command-Shift-D” a la Word. Here I’ve used Command-Shift-Num 1 for my shortcut.
If I needed to create multiple double-underline Character Styles, one for each size of type I’d be applying it to, I’d probably name them “DoubleUnder-10pt” and “DoubleUnder-14pt” and so on, and keep the keyboard shortcuts similar as well.
Click OK to close the dialog box, and test out your style. Select some text and click on the style name or press its keyboard shortcut, and you should see a double-underline appear underneath.
To make the double-underline extend beyond the numbers, add spaces, and apply the same style to the spaces (the tabs below are decimal tabs):
Add the Style to InDesign’s Default Styles
With InDesign running but no documents open, open the Character Styles panel and choose Load Character Style from its fly-out menu. Navigate to an InDesign file that contains the style you created and double-click it to invoke the Load Styles dialog box, listing all of that document’s styles:
Click the Uncheck All button if necessary, and then turn on the checkbox next to the style you want to load — Double Underline, in this case. Then click the OK button, and the style is added to the default Character Styles panel.
From now on, in every new document you create (until you rebuild Preferences) you’ll see this style in your Character Styles panel, meaning you can apply the double-underline to a text selection by pressing its keyboard shortcut. To import the style into an existing layout, just go through the same Load Styles steps using that document’s Character Styles panel.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on January 8, 2008
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Thanks! very useful for Annual Reports.
It’s even easier when using tables to control the double underscoring when needed. We produce about 375 annual reports a year and had to invent financial typesetting in InDesign CS1. Teacups helped tremendously and CS3 took it to heart.
Igor, GREP is a wonderful tool. I use it everyday. And it is wonderful. Generally you would want your underline to stretch out right up to the longest figure of the sum, so how many figure spaces do you put in for each individual sum? It’s impossible to tell with a generic search. I know that you can find all the double spaces, but what about the sentences that begin with a number, or by a bit of bad luck there are double spaces before all the numbers in the main text, then you’re left with two figure spaces in the text (if there is any). It’s just a “what if”, highly unlikely, but hey.
And I will give the figure space a try the next time I have some sums to typeset.
Eugene, with the new GREP options you can record a rule like “change all paragraph-space-space-digit to paragraph-fig.space-fig.space-digit”. Then just run it before formating the publication.
Every time you can identify a pattern, you can apply a GREP solution.
Anyway, tables are also a good way to achieve this. Only knowing the document to conclude about which may be the faster or easier solution.
I’ll definitely consider using the figure space in future. But usually I don’t typeset the document, it usually comes in from Word. So there’s a lot of unnecessary items in there and I have my find/replace routine that I go through to strip it all out. I couldn’t imagine going through a thousand page book with all these sums in it, finding and replacing double spaces before figures in the sums and replacing them with a figure space, just so they underline properly.
I just find it easier to use a table. Plus the need to have the data on our website is important, and tables work better than tabs for us.
The double space removing problem would be avoided if you use Figure Space instead of regular space. Even better is to use Tabular number (an OpenType option) when producing accounting documents.
Tabular numbers and Figure Spaces works together like a charm because this space is exactly the size of a tabular number. For this kind of situation Figure Space is aimed for.
Hi Anne-Marie, what I meant by the underline and overline (rule above) was for colouring in behind the numbers, not for actually underlining them. (That was technique our lecturer taught us in college days, it’s not great and too hard to set up and control). Sorry for the confusion.
Yes I’d have a cell style for double underline and single underline. In some cases I would create my own stroke for the double underline. Depends on the content really.
find it much easier to convert tabbed text to a table and drag it out.
Most of our publications go to our website for our members; the tables translate great into html for us.
For even more flexibility, instead of the Thin-Thin rule, use a combination of underline and strike-through. Or rather “overline” — I’m with Dave on this one.
I’d do essentially what Anne-Marie recommended, except that rather than make it an underline to be used for the last number to be added, I’d make it an “overline” for the total.
Granted, this would require careful positioning and would have to be changed if the fontsize/leading changed, but almost always the total is the widest entry in the list, so you don’t find yourself messing with spaces.
Using A-M’s underlines, you could also use a Figure Space to fill out the number above rather than a pair of regular spaces.
Dave
So you have a cell style that just applies a custom Thin Thin rule to the top edge of it, and use that style in a cell containing a sum total? That’s also a great technique.
Not sure what you mean by “rules above and below with massive offsets” … when would you need to do that?
Hi Anne-Marie, that’s a great tip. I did it do this way for a long time, until I got to the point of frustration because I always remove double spaces from a document, bad habit.
I also have my way of typesetting things like that:
Generally when I format type like this, especially accounting type things, I usually put all the type inside tables. That way I can cell style to make the needed double underline, single under line et al things needed.
Also with this, it allows me to colour in behind the text should it need be and it’s quite easy to distinguish the sums from the rest of the text without having to go to extraordinary lenghts with boxes and anchored objects, rules above and below with massive offsets.
I find it quite flexible to keep the sums inside a table, plus I can keep all the rows together so that they don’t needlessly split over pages.
I know I can control this with Keep Paragraphs and lines together, but it’s just the way I do it.
The only thing that is frustrating is the lack of ability to resize a cell to fit the text, rather than dragging etc.