Down, Paragraph Rule, Down!
Andrea had just completed her InDesign training with me. A week later, she sent me an InDesign file (designed by an outside firm) that was misbehaving and asked,
As you can see from the attached INDD document, the columns on page 1 are not aligning at the top of the frame. I have checked all of the settings and can’t figure out why it is not aligning @ top. If you could suggest a way to fix that, I’d greatly appreciate it.
Here is what she referring to:
Pretty cool subhead treatment, isn’t it? The designers created a paragraph style that included both the yellow background highlighting (Rule Below) and black top rule (Rule Above).
The problem was the offset setting of the Rule Above. When I edited the Paragraph Rule settings and turned on the Keep in Frame option …
… the problem was solved:
The “Keep in Frame” setting forces paragraph rules that appear at the top or bottom of a frame to fall inside it (moving the paragraph text along for the ride) instead of floating outside of the frame boundary.
That’s all … just a little tip that helped Andrea make her deadline!
Ah these little things. You also know that if you choose vertical alignment and centered and then apply a corner option like rounded corners you loose vertical centered allignment? Unless.. you make a inset the same value as the corner size! Presto, you have vertical centered text again!
F vd Geest,
Thank you, a thousand times, thank you!
It would be better if Adobe were to fix this properly, but at least now I know a workaround.
Hey that’s wonderful! My son and I were just about to manually change a whole lot of stuff in this big fat text book we’re working on (hours of friggin’ around – excuse the French [with apologies to all French readers]) and now we won’t have to.
Great timing!
Been there, done did that! I think I picked up the highlight-by-paragraph rule in some ancient InDesign Secrets podcast. Or David’s and Ole’s book. Whatever, it’s been a stable part of my arsenal ever since, and I happened on this little checkbox under much the same circumstances a year or two ago.
You could do an awesome “Advanced InDesign Tips” title for Lynda.com, just picking the “best of” from the blog and the podcast. I’d love to have it as a resource for those times when I’m thinking: “I know there was a nifty handling for this? Where did I put it?”
@F vd Greest, you rock. Thanks for that tip and I wonder how in heck you discovered it.