Making a Text Highlighter
Roger wrote:
In MS Word, you can make text look as if it’s been highlighted with a highlighter marker. It’s a handy feature when you’re trying to emphasize text in, lets say, an article. Can I do that same type of thing in InDesign?
Absolutely! Just press the Highlighter button! (Sory, just kidding.) The trick to making a highlighter effect in InDesign is the Custom Underline feature, which you can find by choosing Underline Options from the Control palette menu when the palette is in character formatting mode. Or, even faster, you can open this dialog box by Option/Alt-clicking on the Underline icon in the Control palette.
Unfortunately, when you select some text to apply this effect, InDesigh highlights it in black, which obscures the effect you’re trying to achieve (while the text is selected, at least). So, when creating this effect, it’s often a good idea to choose Window > Arrange > New Window — this way you can work on the highlighted text but also see the effect in another window on your screen.
Anyway, once you have some text selected and the Custom Underline dialog box open, you can give the text a thick, yellow (or any color) underline. Then adjust the Offset to set the highlight in the position you want vertically.
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Here’s a sample of this highlighting effect (before and after):
Highlight1
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Now here’s the important part: After you make one of these, save it as a character style! (Just Option/Alt-click on the New Character Style button in the Character Styles palette, then give it a name and click OK.) As long as the character style is set to only apply this custom underline effect, you’ll never have to go through the trouble of making one again — just copy that character style from this document to wherever else you need it.
Nice trick but I would suggest using the strike through options for that effect instead. That way you can still highlight and underline at the same time.
Rene, the reason I like Underline rather than Strikethrough is that the strikethrough ends up on top of the text, so you can’t see the text! You can turn on overprint, but then you need Overprint on to see it, and there are other potential issues to contend with.
WOW! I had no idea that I’d get an answer so quick and be the subject of a blog. Thanks so much. InDesignsecrets.com is now my #1 desktop publishing bookmark.
Thanks David. I spent the morning having words with Mr. Gates so the “click the highlighter button” response brought belly laughs. I have used somewhat transparent yellow, green, blue and pink as fills in tables that needed highlighter effects and hadn’t even thought about this approach.
“As long as the character style is set to only apply this custom underline effect, you’ll never have to go through the trouble of making one again…”
Well, almost never. The highlight has a fixed size and offset, so type set at different sizes/leadings will need different underline styles for their highlights. When I create such character styles I usually name them something like “Highlight YLO 11pt” with the size refering to the type point size. Then I save them to a global template from which I load various styles into specific projects.
Ah, yes, Pariah. Excellent point. If only we could type a percentage of type size in those fields!
I would like to suggest another alternate is Paragraph Rules (cmd+opt J) if you want the ultimate in control. The trouble with underline is that tends to clip very tightly to the end letterforms, with rules you can add an offset, which is needed for right aligned text - say in a page header. The pain with rules is that you need to play with the above and below parameters to make it apply to an entire paragraph block, slightly flakey.
I would probably use the Rule Above/Rule Below method if I were trying to highlight a one-line heading (such as reversed out text). However, if you are simply selecting one or more words in a paragraph, the paragraph rules feature is pretty clunky. If you want extra space before or after the text highlight, just add some sort of white space when you’re applying the custom underscore.
Just to be bold and different…
You can create an anchored object, and use that as a highlight. Sure, it’s more work than just using a character style — but you can brag to your friends that you use anchored objects
Mordy, if you’re looking for a more complex method to achieve the same effect, you can also draw with a highlighter pen on a piece of acetate, photograph it against a bluescreen with a high-end digital camera, use a plug-in to set the blue to transparency, import the graphic, place it over the text, and use the Transparency palette to set it to Multiply. That is to say, there is always a more difficult way to do something! I’d rather get the job done than brag to friends.
Trust me David, I don’t go looking for more complex methods… they find me
A derivative trick is to include preceding and trailing white space or punctuation in the selection, set the Underline > Type to Dotted or Japanese Dots, and then apply the same swatch to the Color and Gap Color. This gives you a nicely rounded highlight as opposed to the blocky version.
Great idea, Caleb! This was shown in the most recent issue of InDesign Magazine (indesignmag.com) but with paragraph rules. I like the idea of doing this with the custom highlighting.
A solution to Mark’s problem where the ‘underline … tends to clip very tightly to the end letterforms’ is to add a thin space (shift+opt+cmd+m) to either end of the text and include that space when creating the rule.
However, what I want to know is this: will the black text (if the text is black) overprint onto the yellow/whatever colour rule when separated? Or will it be knocked out?
Yes, by default, anything set to the [Black] color will overprint. But if you make your own color swatch that is 100%K, it will knock out — unless you specify overprint in the Attributes palette.
Here’s a good way to check: Open Window > Output > Separations Preview, set the palette to On, and turn off colors one at a time to see what’s overprinting and what’s knocking out.
Caleb, very very clever! I love it.
I hope you can help, I can’t find a fix.
My client wants certain paragraphs highlighted, and when I use the custom underline thingy, I get a ragged right margin even though the text is justified. Please tell me there is a trick for this.
If not, I may have to resort to anchor boxes which will be such a pain because the text may often break between columns and the client is CONSTANTLY making edits so text is constantly shifting.
Any ideas? Thanks.
OK… one thing I just noticed. I had a 1p left and 1p indent. If I remove the indent, it works fine.
Anything I’m missing that would work with the indented (block) text using the highlight trick?
I’m baaaaaccccckkkkk… This morning I pulled up the file and was pleasantly surprised to see that the highlighted text was perfectly aligned on the right.
But before I could celebrate, I extended the text box and poof! the ragged edges were back. So I experimented. If there are 6 lines in the paragraph, it’s nicely aligned, if I pull up the text box, to 5, 4, 3, 2 lines or pull down to 7, 8, 9 it’s ragged.
Any ideas? (The font is Helvetica Neue, Open Type.)
Hi Cathleen… wacky! You’re right. This appears to happen only when there is a right indent:
The space characters at the end of each line are being highlighted, where as when there is no indent, the space characters “disappear.”
I can’t think of any good solution other than to replace the space at the end of every line of the paragraph with a Shift-Return. (Blech!) Or, better yet, find a way to not use the 1p right indent.
I use this feature for underlining text that has changed in our document and if any of the text already has a character style (e.g. bold) applied, it gets overrided and changes to the paragraph style. Grr. I like to use the character style so I can eliminate it quickly in subsequent versions. Am I missing anything?
is it possible to change the opacity of the underline (so that if the text block is over an image you can still see some of the image through it?)
@ Joe
No. Opacity is an attribut of whole Frames, whole Boarders, whole Text – but not of specific Text attributes or Characters.
I am no techy, and have not learned to highlight, yet. But this ragged edge bit, seems to me, could be over come by adding yellow type to the ends of the right side, as necessary, to cause the yellow desired highlighting to match the effect you desire. This sounds reasonable to me. Let me know if it works.
Hey. Thanks for posting this. After much work on trying to figure out this simple task, I turned to Google and found this tutorial. Thank you so much for your time in putting this online. It’s been a huge help to me and my magazine.
Thanks
Bo Lane