Paragraph Format

Lesson Info

Paragraph Format

I'm going to do a new page, a new document, I mean, and I'm going to create a new text frame and I'm just going to type the word headline here will fill the rest with cem placeholder text and on this ward headline let's actually make that in caps and I'm typing in captain holding down there if I put the cap locks cheon I'm stuck with that his caps, so sometimes you'll get that you'll think get some checks from somebody else, it'll be all in caps and I think, oh, good, I'm just going to go in there and d select all caps and it'll go away and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, and it depends on how it was entered was entered with cap locks on you're just stuck with caps and unfortunately I get a lot of type like that, so make this bold we're gonna make this a little bit bigger so you can see that it's our headline anall zoom in a teeny tiny amount. What I want to do is I want to have something back behind that headline I want either maybe something it's, a yellow highlight or ju...

st a box I want that type to travel in a bar, not a box, but with lines around it, and I just want something different to happen to it so what I can do is a sign was called a paragraph rule, and this is not a rule that says this is how this paragraph must behave this's a rule as an I drew a rule across the page and doing a line, so what I want to do is because I'm working with a paragraph, I only need to have my cursor in the paragraph, I don't need to select the whole thing, I'm going over to the paragraph panel and the panel menu, which is in the upper right of that panel and come down to paragraph rules I'm gonna move this out of the way and I'm gonna turn on preview also, so I can see that and I'm going to tell it, and actually before I do that, I want to center this it's just going to work a little bit better fit centered we'll go back to the paragraph, panel, paragraph rules and turned on the previous we can see what's happening, and then I need to choose whether or not I want to rule above a rule below and I could do both. But in this case, what I want is a colored box back behind so really almost doesn't matter if it's blower above, because either way, we're gonna have to move it to get it right behind, so to save below and then tell it rule on so right now I have this line that sits below it and runs the entire length of that the text frame that's there what I want to do first is tell it I don't want it to be the whole width of the column I wanted to just run the width of the text that's right now I just have a line we're not worried about being a box is just a line but I also wanted to be a little bit further out because when it is a box I wanted to stick out a little bit past the letters so I'm going to go over here to the right and left invent and I'm just going to use the minus keys just use the down arrow keys just to make it stick out a little bit past that particular text that's there then I want to come back up now when I start making into a box well first thing I'd probably want to do is change the color now if you are doing an underlying you can tell it text color instead of actually telling it black which is the text color that we have but instead of doing that I can tell a text color that way if I change the text color to something else the line will change as well so that's kind of a handy thing for keeping that on there let's make this a nice bright orange and next thing I need to do is make it well a little bit fatter so I can actually have a box instead right now I'm just going to keep bringing that up let's actually we'll make it about to that size and I need to move it up a little bit obviously because it's now still alive but I needed a box sitting back behind and that's what? This is here is this offset? Right? So let's, go with the negative offset move it up till I get where I need to be. That looks pretty good actually just changes a little bit move it up it looks pretty good. So now that box is sitting right there it's a line, actually, but as I type more if I say this is the headline, it grows with it because I've told it to sit under the type, stick out a little bit and be this with back behind that makes sense everybody, we're going ok so that's a paragraph well, I know if I sit there if I hit return now it looks a little weird because that line move down below I did a shift return or a soft return could do that, but if I hit returned here and type more it's a whole new paragraph I've got that extra spacing that's here and that's why it doesn't, you know, is in a solid line if I wanted to, I could make sure I didn't have space afterwards and I would also make that line thicker back there, but I mean, that's a quick way to do that so that even if I put stuff up above let's, copy some stuff and paste it in and hit return lips let's not do it that way let's actually see if we can just type back before it and wolves crazy with my mouse here this morning, I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to turn off the rule here because I want this to be a separate paragraph and I don't want the rule on here and I could even do the thing we just did as I could pick up with my eye dropper tool. This is one place where I use it if I don't have styles assigned just yet, sometimes I don't put styles to the end, I can pick up the style here and assign it to this here. All right? So now I have that so that as I have more type of above that line obviously travels with that stiff, trying to put a box back behind, and every time your text re flows to sit in to have to move those those boxes down every time it is a pain there's a lot of cool things you could do with that and a cz well is just a big solid you can play with the different lines that are available there's actually some really cool tutorials online and a friend of mine didn't really just like an hour long thing on just paragraph rules I'm just shed some really fun ones that she came up with one the ones I really like that she came up with is what type of line can you can you do you do these dotted lines if he wanted tio which kind of looks fun but the cool thing is with dots and dashes you can tell it what color the gap between those dots and dashes are so if I make it the same exact color now I have a rounded line toe work with so that's kind of cool instead of just a box usually would stick that out just a little bit more probably make it a little bit thicker line there and move it up a little bit all right something like that so that's kind of cool we could have a nice brown did boxes as well we could just do all sorts of things one of the things she also does you know, just something different like that, you know, just fun to do so and the cool thing is that you could have no text in there at all so you could just have this fund shape if you wanted that traveled with the text you could do just a line by itself but if you don't have it traveling but if you come in here of course is going to make because I told it the width of the text it's going to go away but if we had it the width of the the margin instead it would remain all right so we wouldn't need to change that but the cool thing is we could do some fun things back behind with the different lines that are available and I like that again I don't have to move the frame every time the text changes because I've done manuals upon manuals that way where I had to do that and that's just that's a lot of four we don't have to do that so that's paragraph rules to keep mine that's not a rule for a paragraph that's an actual rule that you draw underneath the paragraph makes sense all right let's go on a little bit more something not nearly as exciting but something that confuses people are tabs anybody know what a tent knows what a tab is? I'm sure we've been using these since the dark ages, right? So we hit tab and its spaces it over a certain amount or if you're like me, you get things from family that have spaces instead of tabs they lined it up in the email looked good you know here's here's the information I need printed in that thing in its space base base base base a face in the next information instead of using the tab key the temp keys weaken set where the tabs happen instead of counting how many spaces air in between everything so I created a new text frame and I'm just going to hit letters and tap so one tab to tap three tab all the way across and then I'm going to just do a b, c d e and I'm hitting tab in between each one that someone's going to select this and I want to make sure that I haven't selected because when I start setting tabs, I need to make sure I select the the characters that I need to affect the tabs so we do under the type menu this is one of the weird ones that moved away tabs used to be under our window menu somewhere, but now they're not they used to always sit over here is well, but now they're only over here so our tabs panel for whatever reason lives under the tight menu only must have done something wrong they sent him away and by default it automatically puts the tab box right on top of the text, which is kind of handy because you can see where the tabs air lined up but what I don't like is that there's, you know, drop shadow here I like to move it away a little bit and that's fine, because as soon as I go to put a tab on here it's going to draw a line and show me where the tab actually is, so by default there are tabs every half inch when you start right? So are pending what you're using there is already a set of incremental tabs that air there they're just there by default, so when I hit tab it automatically tabbed it half a niche, but I can change that and I come up here to the different types of tabs left center, right justified on a character and it says aligned to decimal but we can also change it to something else can line on any character doesn't have to be a decimal it all, so I'm just going to use the left tab here and I'm just going to click and when I click and hold, I get a line showing me where that tab is actually going to be. I also can see a write up above where my arrow is I can see the value of that particular tab, so maybe I know exactly where it needs to be aiken type in the value instead, so if I don't hit it exactly can come in here and just type in here maybe this was supposed to be point nine and then I hit the tab of all things for it to take I don't want it returned because I have my character's selected I would just delete all my characters so I've just said a tab there I'm just going to draw another one said another left tab another left tab and I can always change it any time I decide actually I don't want that to be a left justified tab I wanted it to be a right justified tab so I can take this and just hit my right justification that way and it moved it just meant it put the right hand side of those letters on that tab space that's there I can also at any time come over to the panel menu and clear them if I don't like them now I know it's not very exciting but there's a couple of things that we can do with it that I do like you were just you know how much space you have to take up but you don't know how much to set those tabs that that's kind of a pain sorry if you've ever done this before we go ok I'm gonna put one of three quarters of an inch then we do three more quarters of an inch one two three pull in here one two, three and then you get all the way to the end and you realize they only to go just a little bit more so here's what I do with that I say okay I kind of like the way that spacing is I think that will fill they were trying to fill this whole frame so let's do that say that might fill the whole frame so I'm gonna do one come over to the panel menu and say repeat tab it's going automatically throw it at that same distance and I realized that was not far enough that all was it so I'm going to grab this first half again and just moving over a little bit more and hit repeat tab and it's not going to add extra is going take all the ones that are there and force it down even further so that to me is really cool I know it's it's not a huge trick but I love it because I get this all the time all right I think ok good that looks good I like that with this last happen these air all right justified tabs with this last half let's add a leader dot so we want something that connects it we want those dots you know, for doing page numbers something on page three you know that the leader dots that go into the page number let's do that between these last two tabs so I've selected this very last tab the right tab there and I have my little cursor blinking here in this leader leader box. I could put whatever I wanted that whatever character I want to repeat all the way up to the next tab. And so this case I want to put a period I know it's really hard to see it's teeny tiny. I'm going to put a period and then I tend to put a space also there's like a little bit more breathing room between my leader dots it's, probably bad typography, that's. All right, I like it. And then I want to eat the tab key so it takes. So now I have those leader dots between those two tax. If I move this tab, those leader dots change. All right, so that's something I use a lot. And if I do want this tab box the tab panel to sit right back on top of the text I can hit this little magnet key right there and it just jumps it right back to where it wass but again, I like to pull it off and get it. Get out of my way. So the leader dots are I can also tell it to a line on a particular item let's say in this column we have actual numbers and we've got some decimal points here as well and right now they're not lined up by the by the decimal that's their their lineup I've told that this is a right justified tab that's what this tab is here but I wanted to instead has changed this too in a line on the decimal so I just say a line on decimal and it suddenly lines it all up based on the decimal point instead and again I could line it on some of the character right now when I want to click the decimal it automatically put a decimal in this teeny tiny little box here it says go ahead in a line on that particular box but instead maybe I want to say a line on the character maybe we haven't x something like that so when I do that of course ignores it because it doesn't want to do with that really because there is no x in that space what's actually put a little x there and now everything lines up by that as well. If you had times, for instance and you want to do that on the colin, we could do the same thing if we put the colon in there that at least everything would line up whether it's, you know, three thirty or we're going to d'oh twelve forty five right says got wounded lineup but all did it let's try why I didn't do that it is not aligning on that there we go I don't know what it's issue was but it's good now it's all fixed so yes we can line up on any character that we have in there as well so that's probably more than you ever wonder knowabout tabs but I know it does one thing people can't figure how to do this and the leader dots is one of the things that people have the hardest time with us figuring out the leader dots and if we do get a chance to go over tables of contents later today which we may or may not if we dio that's something you might need to know about or something to think about if we don't get to it right all right, any questions so far on the tech stuff that we've gone over so have a little bit more little bit more tech stuff but before we get into I want to make sure everybody it is clear to where we are is everybody good here too many questions from out in the internet at all we did looking for just ones related to text just the ones we've maybe got anything we've gone over today oh well then yes excellent which is all text stuff yes, yes great let's start with this one from cheese louise eyes their way to change the eye drop or tool back to the empty eye dropper pick pick up styles after you've dropped styles on other text, or do you have to switch to another tool to get the hydra? You know you can do that? I dropped or tool whenever you're using the eyedropper tool, if I pick something up, if I hold on the option key or the altar chiana pc, it goes back to the empty one. So it's, like I picked that up that's, not really what I wanted to pick up, hold it down, hold on the option can pick something else up, you know, it's. Now. It picked up a color before I was picking up text. I'm holding down the option tea, and you can tell it's text it's the black here, but I say, oh, that's not really wanted what I wanted. I want to pick up the color from the eyedropper tool. Hold on the option or the all key, and now I'm picking up the color that's there.

Class Description

Lessons

1The Indesign Environment 2Working with InDesign Elements Part 1 3Working with InDesign Elements Part 2 4Working with Graphics 5Working with Color 6Working with Text 1Text Wrapping and Attributes 2Paragraph Format 3Open Type Font 4Tables 5Layers and Pages 6Libraries 7Paragraph and Character Styles 8General Q&A and Style Graphic Standards 9Print Output 10Preflight and File Packaging 11Export Options and Final Q&A