From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Highlighting paragraphs with boxes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Highlighting paragraphs with boxes

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- [Instructor] You can see these shaded areas that call out some paragraphs around the page. How do we create that kind of paragraph border or shading effect? Well, let's start off by using the type tool, and then I'll select a couple of these paragraphs over here. Remember, you don't have to select the whole paragraph to tell InDesign what I want to change. Now, I'll zoom into 200% by pressing Command or Control + 2. To apply paragraph shading, I want to make sure the Control Panel is set to paragraph mode. Then I come over here and turn on the shading checkbox. We can also choose a color from the menu to the right, but this doesn't really give us any control over the size or the tint of the shading. So to get all of the controls, hold down the Option or Alt key and click on this little icon next to the menu. Up comes the paragraph borders and shading dialogue box. And technically, this is two different features in one. There's shading and there's border. I'm going to focus on shading first, and then I'll get to borders in just a moment. First, you need to make sure the shading checkbox is turned on here. Now, choose a color. I'll choose this light gray color here. That tint is probably too light, so let's make this, oh, say 70%. I'm going to move this dialect box out of the way so we can see what we're doing a little bit. And to see the changes, make sure you turn on the preview checkbox. If you want, you can change the offset values here to push the shading away from the text. But in this design, it just calls for zero offsets, so I'll leave those alone. I should point out that sometimes, when you run shading across more than one paragraph, you'll get some white space in the middle between the paragraphs. It's not a problem here, but if you do see a white space when you do this, then increase the top or bottom offset amounts until the shading overlaps and the space disappears. Now, you can control other aspects of the shading box as well, like you could give it rounded corners if you want, but I think this looks fine for now, so I'll click OK. Alright, now what about that borders thing? Borders are basically just the same as shading, but it's a stroke instead of a fill. We could put a border around both of these paragraphs, but in this case, let's just apply it to the second one. So I'll place my cursor inside that paragraph, and then I'll turn on the border checkbox. You can see this leaves us with a one-point black stroke that's not very attractive, so let's make it prettier. I'm going to hold on the Option or Alt key when I click this little icon to the right. Up comes that same dialog box, but this time, we're in border mode. In this case, I don't want the border to go around the entire paragraph. I just want to draw a line to the left. So I'm going to change all of these to zero. Then I'll unlink this little chain icon in the middle and change just the left one to say three points. Let's change this color to something else. How about brown? And we should also change the offsets a little bit. And I'm going to move this over to the right side of the screen so we can see what we're doing. First, I'll unlink this little icon again. Now, I'm going to change the top to say three points. I'll hit tab to go to the next field. I'll make this one three points, and then over here on the left, I'll make that three points too. As I made those changes, because the preview checkbox is on, you can see the line sticking out here. That looks good. Oh, I should mention one more thing. If you're putting a border around two or more paragraphs, you can make InDesign merge them together by turning on this Merge Consecutive Borders and Shading with Same Settings checkbox. That's a mouthful. But this same settings phrase is important. It only works when the borders or strokes are exactly the same thickness, color, and so on. So anyway, this looks good, so I'll click OK. I really love this paragraph border and shading feature. I don't need it for most of the documents I make, but when I do need it, it just saves so much time.

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