From the course: InDesign Secrets
134 Adding effects to your rule above and rule below - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
134 Adding effects to your rule above and rule below
This headline demonstrates one of the most common effects that people want to make in InDesign, a headline where the text is reversed out of a dark background. I showed how to do this in my InDesign Essential Training title here in the online training library, but I want to show you a few tricks to make it look even cooler. Now, of course, because I've applied this to several different paragraphs, I made a paragraph style. And the paragraph style is called Department Drawing. So I'm going to right-click on that and click on Edit Department Drawing. This way, by editing the paragraph style options, I change it everywhere in my document. I'll click on the Paragraph Rules pane inside this dialog box. And you can see that all of these are set up with the rule above. It's a very thick rule above, 10 points with a minus 2 offset that sets it down a little bit from the baseline. And it's set to a nice dark solid color. Now, let's start tweaking these settings to make it a little bit more interesting. Let's start by changing the left indent settings. By increasing the left indent, it actually moves the rule to the right. That's not very interesting. I want to move it to the left. So instead of positive values, I want negative values. I can just move this back or just type in what I want. For example, minus 1p. I'll hit Tab, and you'll see that it moves to the next field, and the rule actually moved to the left one pica. We can make this even bigger by saying minus 4p, and then I'll Tab. It's actually bleeding off the side of the page. Now let's change the right side. Before I change the right indent, I'm going to change the width of this to text. That way, it will only cover the text itself. But we do want to a little bit beyond the text, so we'll change the right indent. Once again, setting it to a negative value. That way, it will extend passed the end of the word. How can I put a rounded cap on the end of that rule instead of a sharp edge with corners? I want a nice rounded cap. To do that, all I need to do is change the type from a solid to a dotted. Either of the dotted values will work. Now, it doesn't look like it's going to work quite yet because it gives me a bunch of dots. But here's the trick, change the gap color. The color of the space between those dots. And I'm going to chose the same color as I have up here. I happen to know it's this one right there. If the stroke color and the gap color are the same, you won't notice the pattern. It just looks like a solid line with a rounded cap. There are some other fun things we can do with rules as well. Let's set this back to solid and make this even thicker. How about 20 points instead of just 10? I'll set the offset down a little bit, just to move it down just slightly below the baseline. And I'm not going to turn on a rule below. So in this little pop-up menu, I'll choose Rule Below and then click Rule On. Here you see I have a one point white rule. It's white because it's the same color as the text itself. That's set up here in the color pop-up menu. I'm going to make sure it stays white no matter what the text color is by setting this color to Paper. Then I'll make this even thicker, let's say 7 or 8 points. And I'll change the offset to a negative value to move it up. I'm just hitting the down arrow on my keyboard to move this in one-point increments. You can already see that by adding the rule below to the rule above, you can get different shapes. This is kind of a stair steppe shape. Let's go ahead and change this left indent to minus 4 picas, so it knocks all the way out, and then change this type to a dotted line. Well, let's say Japanese dots. Let's change the offset here, move it a little bit higher. And now, you can see that you are getting a very a different effect where the rule below is knocking out the rule above. If you change the type, you change the effect. So, let's try the right slant hash and see what that looks like. Yeah, this is really starting to look fun. Try it yourself. See what kind of cool affects you can come up with in your documents.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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