From the course: InDesign Secrets

222 Adding paragraph shading - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

222 Adding paragraph shading

- Quick, can you spot all the headings and sub-headings on this spread? No, it would take zooming in, and hunting around until you caught them. But if we added color to the headings, then they'd jump right out, right? But I don't want to change the actual color of the text on those headings, because I might forget to change it back to black later. And that would be bad when it comes time to print or export my PDF. But there's another way to give a paragraph a color. You can use Paragraph Shading. That's a feature in InDesign CC that lets you put a colored box behind any paragraph. And Paragraph Shading has a feature that makes it perfect for our purposes. Here, let's try it. First, I'm going to open the Paragraph Styles panel over here in the dock. And then I'm going to right-click on the Subtitle Style. Or, if you only have a one button mouse, you could control-click. That opens up the Context Menu. And from here, I can choose Edit. Next, I'll click on Paragraph Shading in this next list on the left. And I'm going to turn Shading On. Let's choose a color that will really be obvious. Like Magenta, that'll really pop. And I'm going to make sure that Tint is set to 100%. Now, down here, here is the trick that you need to know. Turn on the Do not Print or Export check-box. That way, it'll show up on screen, but it won't print or export to PDF. OK, let's try it out. I'll click OK. And it doesn't look like anything happened, right? But that's because we're currently in Preview Mode. Remember, Preview Mode only shows things that will actually print or export. But if I press the "w" key to come out of Preview Mode, there you go, now we see those subtitles really clearly. But, again, they will not print or export to PDF. I love that.

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