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• • December 20, 2018 at 8:01 am #113020
    Vincent De Nil

    Member

    Hey guys, longtime lurker here and posting here because this particular problem has me beat.

    I’m trying to get a paragraph style in that draws black boxes as background for every line, starting about two spaces before the beginning of a line and ending two spaces after. Both Underline and Shading can do something like this, however both have their quirks that I can’t seem to work around.

    Exhibit A: Underline will end the black bar correctly after the last letter, but there is no options to create a bit of blank space before the line starts

    View post on imgur.com

    Exhibit B: Paragraph Shading will draw a black bar all the way until the end of the text box, creating large black spaces on shorter lines

    View post on imgur.com

    For reference, this is the result I am looking for

    View post on imgur.com

    Does anyone have a solution for this? thanks for any and all help!
    Vincent

  • December 20, 2018 at 9:51 am #113022
    Dieter Stockert

    Member

    You can do that with a character style and the underlining options.

  • December 21, 2018 at 2:23 am #113031
    Vinny –

    Member

    I’m a CS6 so I can’t play with borders/paragraphs shading, but here’s an idea:

    First, as stated by Dieter, you need to use the underlining feature.
    Please note that you can set it up in your paragraph style directly by the way.

    2 problems:

    – When your paragraph ends, you need to add an extra space after the last character in order to avoid underlining to stop right after it. Just like in your example : after “quat”. (NB: you still can’t guarantee perfect consistency: see C&J)

    – The main problem: left indent. As you said, it’s a long time lurker than underlining doesn’t allow left/right indentation.
    So I was thinking: what about adding a black left-border shading in your paragraph style? Can’t test it but… give it a try and tell us.
    So far, my CS6 solution was to put my text into a cell and add a left-border to it…

    Edit: ah… couldn’t embed the imgur… how did you do that?
    Ok here’s the link: https://imgur.com/iRhnPem

  • December 27, 2018 at 4:39 pm #113091
    Michel Allio for FRIdNGE

    Participant

    Hi Vinny!

    OK for the left side shading but, on the right side, truly not convinced by your demonstration! …

    As visible on your gift, absolutely no control of the width of the underlining at the end of line!

    Best,
    Michel, for FRIdNGE

  • December 28, 2018 at 3:04 am #113098
    Vincent De Nil

    Member

    Hey Vinny and Michel,

    Vinny’s solution works great! There’s what I have so far. We can adjust the shading at the end of a line by adding extra blank spaces – not the most elegant solution but it does work

    The only problem I have is that the left-line paragraph stroke keeps running between paragraphs, is there a way to make it only appear where there is text?

    View post on imgur.com

    Incase you were wondering about embedding images: You need to copy the ‘direct link’ from imgur and not the imgur link, that should embed the image

  • December 28, 2018 at 1:30 pm #113119
    Michel Allio for FRIdNGE

    Participant

    Vincent,

    Don’t say Vinny’s solution works great! … As all can see in your screenshot, it’s not true! …

    [in French] … Mais bon ! Jamais trop tard en cette période pour croire au Père Noël ! ;-)

    Best,
    Michel

  • December 29, 2018 at 10:48 am #113143
    Vinny –

    Member

    Hi guys.
    Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never demonstrated how to keep constant spacing on the right… I specifically wrote that you can’t get an equal space.
    Now, if Michel poped in between foie gras and Xhampagne, I suppose he has a smart solution for this interesting puzzle.
    I’m curious now…
    Come on Michel, tell us more :-)

  • January 3, 2019 at 10:45 am #113299
    John Beeckaert

    Participant

    Fairly new to Indesign, as i haven’t used it the past 15 yrs, but cant you just define the space between the 2 parapraphs as a “blanc paragraph style” with simply a space in that area as the only character?

    • January 3, 2019 at 11:20 am #113301
      John Beeckaert

      Participant

      View post on imgur.com

      That’s how I did it, is perhaps a bit unorthodox, but it works.

  • January 7, 2019 at 3:08 am #113409
    Vincent De Nil

    Member

    I think that solves our problem! I simply set the empty and outlines paragraph styles to follow on eachother. It’s been a bit of a workaround, but we made it happen :). Thanks for all the help guys!

  • January 7, 2019 at 6:10 am #113410
    Vinny –

    Member

    Hi there,
    back from holidays, back to business, back to this interesting puzzle…

    About the left-side paragraph border running between 2 paragraphs, I don’t think adding a double return is the correct way. You might end up with unwanted spacing at the top of your frames or columns.
    I still don’t use CC (Santa was not so good with me) and still can’t play with para shading/borders, but a fast search led me to this article:
    https://creativepro.com/applying-seamless-shading-consecutive-paragraphs.php

    So my question is: what happens if you untick “Merge consecutive borders and shading with same settings”?

    Now, back to the main problems:

    First, how do you keep consistent spacing at the end of each line?
    Well, the answer is simply to add some right-indent to your paragraph style (e.g. 2mm).
    This will simply push down the words (and the following spaces), that were too close to the frame boundary…

    Other cases might come up where text will be send to next line, even if it’s not preceded by a space.
    For instance: compound words might be “broken” after the dash. A simple Grep style to prevent breaking should fix it. You also don’t want “AC/DC” to break after /.
    Not sure where to find a list of all “breaking” characters, but for sure – _ / \ em and en dashes are part of them.
    Apply a “nobreak” Grep style to [-_~=~_]. should be a good start.

    Finally, there will still be a need for an extra (and single) space at the end of each paragraph.
    I suppose a Grep Find/Replace should do the job. Something like find (.)*$ and replace by $1 maybe?

    I know Michel is not convinced… Still waiting for his brilliant suggestion (no irony inside)

    Best regards and Happy new year to everyone ^^

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