From the course: InDesign Secrets
347 How to merge paragraph shading - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
347 How to merge paragraph shading
- [Instructor] First Adobe added paragraph shading, then they added borders, then in the next version, they added the feature to merge borders of consecutive paragraphs. What did they forget? They forgot the merge shading, yes. I'm going to show you what the problem is, and then I'm going to show you the fix in the current version of InDesign that I'm using here, CC 2018.1. Alright, so let's take a look at borders. First of all, I'm going to zoom in a bit. If you click inside of a paragraph, and you're in the paragraph mode here, we can just turn on border, and you'll see the default border setting. You can also choose paragraph border and shading from this dialogue box. Now what if you wanted to apply borders to multiple paragraphs? I'm going to select some text in three consecutive paragraphs, and turn on border, and you get this lovely thing, which looks pretty stupid. So in 2018.1, they added the option to merge the borders, if you Option or Alt + Click right here, that's a shortcut to the dialogue box, kind of neat, so we have border, you want to turn on merge consecutive borders, and shading with the same settings, we don't have any shading in this, but it's part of the border panel. So you click OK, and this is what it did. Okay, fine, let's select these three, turn off border, and now we'll do shading. Select the three, shading, well we don't want it to be completely black, so let's change the tint here, I'm going to Option or Alt + Click, go to shading, I'll change the tint to just 20% or so. And you can see the issue is that we have these gaps in between the paragraphs. Come back here, Option or Alt + Click here, go back to shading, where is the merge shading when all the settings are the same? They're not there, they're only here in the border, but we don't have a border, so these are dimmed. The only way to fix this, normally, is to start futzing around with the offsets, add a bottom offset to this one, and a top offset to the next one so they kind of overlap, and I believe there's a script around that will help you with this, but it's kind of a pain. All we want is the same chunk of gray background behind these three paragraphs with no white lines in between, and those white lines are there of course because we have space above and below some of these paragraph settings. Alright, so here's the fix, go to border, turn on the border turn on merge consecutive borders and shading, see what it did, isn't that nice? But we're going to make the border zero all the way around, and that's the end of that story. There you go.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
-
-
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
-
-
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-