From the course: InDesign Secrets

343 Border spacing fix - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

343 Border spacing fix

- [Instructor] I want to show you a fix for something that you may encounter if you're using the new-ish paragraph borders feature in InDesign. So, let's just take a look at how the normal paragraph border works. I have a document in front of me. I've applied the border to this paragraph. Let me zoom in a bit with Command or Control Plus. And as I edit this paragraph, I'll just add some nonsense words, you can see it grows and shrinks as necessary to accompany it, right? That's perfect. I've applied it by going to the Control panel menu, down to Paragraphs Borders and Shading and I've turned on a border with a one point stroke and an eighth of an inch offset, so it's pushed away from the text a bit. And that looks pretty good. It could also be included in a paragraph style, right? But where is the problem? The problem is if this paragraph splits across columns or frames. For example, say that I want to merge this paragraph with this one. I want it to be all one paragraph. So, I'll press the Delete key here and now that it's a longer paragraph and it had to split or jump these two columns, it looks kind of weird. And that's because of the offsets. You see at the bottom of this paragraph, it's offset an eighth of an inch, and at the top of this paragraph, it's offset an eighth of an inch. Let me switch to normal view by tapping the W key, and you can see that it's actually extending beyond the borders of the text frame. If this were a paragraph shaving, that would be an easy fix. You could click anywhere inside the paragraph, go down to the Shading panel, and turn on clip to frame. That would make sure that it doesn't extend beyond the frame. But that's not going to work for this. It doesn't even exist as an option. However, my friend Ariel Walden, who is a fantastic InDesign genius, and scripts all kinds of stuff, came up with a great solution. His company is at BookCraft.com. He said that what you can do is set the offsets for the top and the bottom to zero. So, I'm going to turn off "Make All Settings the Same" and set the top option to zero and the bottom to zero. Of course, that looks stupid, right? Because it's way too close. And then what he discovered, I'll click OK here, is that you could select a character, like this space character, and if you increase the vertical scale enough, it will push the border away. So, say I enter 200% in the vertical scale field and hit Return, do you see how it pushed it away? And you could do the same thing in the bottom line. You could select a space or select even the paragraph return. Here what he discovered is that you have to make a larger increment. So, let's try 300%. And that's pretty good. We could continue experimenting, and that fixes the problem. So, as I remove lines from the paragraph, it fixes it. And if I actually bring it into its own paragraph, so it stays in the same line, it looks fine. Of course, we're not going to be seeing this in the PDF or the print out. I'll switch back to Preview by tapping the W key, and it looks great. Then, what we discovered, is that you could actually include all of this vertical scaling, as well as the border in one single paragraph style. Here, I've switched to a new document where I added with these paragraph styles. Let me switch to my Type tool and I click inside this paragraph. In the Paragraph Styles panel, it's called Bordered Paragraph Whole, meaning it's just a normal bordered paragraph and the line extends below and above where the paragraph splits. But if I click Bordered Paragraph Broken, or I could have called it split, there we have our solution that's using the scale characters. And what I did was I created two character styles, one for vertical scale of the final line and one for vertical scale of the first line. And then in the paragraph style panel, if you go to Edit Paragraph Style and look at the drop caps and nested styles, I've applied first line vertical scale through one, and this is actually a space marker. There's no way to apply a nested style to a carriage return, so instead we're using a GREP style. Applies the character style final line vertical style to the GREP code backslash R, which means final return. And that is what's happening, is that it has fixed it. There you go. So, if you object to how these paragraph borders look when the paragraph splits across columns or frames and there's no way to avoid it, then try out this solution. I think at some point, Adobe is going to add a clip to top and bottom down here, but until then, we can use Ariel's very clever solution.

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