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How to get white letters on a black background in a paragraph style?

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    • March 25, 2010 at 9:32 pm #55319
      Andrew Pavey
      Participant

      I'm creating a long document from a database and I want to embed character and paragraph styles (I know how to do this).

      The generated document will be placed into InDesign CS4.

      In particular I want a single line heading set in reverse text ie white letters on a black background the full width of the text block, every now and again, but I can't work out how to set up a paragraph style to make the background for just that line black. I can change the size, font, colour of the letters, but there seems no way to change the background colour for the individual paragraph.

      Can anyone suggest how to achieve this effect?

    • March 26, 2010 at 3:19 am #55322
      Theunis De Jong
      Member

      Depending on your exact needs, you can or you can't do that with InDesign.

      InDesign does not support “setting a background color” for text. Fortunately, there are a few tricks that do work in some circumstances. The most popular is the Paragraph Rule.

      This only works with single line stuff (like your heading!). In your heading style, define a Paragraph Rule Below. Make it thick enough for your text plus some more — about the height of the leading. Set the Offset to about minus half that value. Enable “Preview” so you can tinker with it until you are satisfied.

      Unfortunately, if you run into the odd multi-line heading, the Paragraph Rule thing will not seem to work. Actually, it does but exclusively with a fixed number of lines, so you have to define separate styles for 1-line headings, 2-line headings, etc., each with a different line thickness and vertical offset.

    • March 26, 2010 at 5:47 am #55329
      Eelco
      Participant

      Try using “line styles” within your paragraph styles! Works pretty nifty.

    • March 26, 2010 at 7:28 pm #55343
      Andrew Pavey
      Participant

      Thank You for the tip. That will do fine. I'm pretty sure I'll only need to deal with one liners.

      Now that you've jogged my memory I think the Indesigner podcast dealt with something like this I'll go and check out the details.

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