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.

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