Comments on: Making a Text Highlighter

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:29:05 +0000

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?)

By: Anita

Anita — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:16:18 +0000

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?

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:00:57 +0000

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.

By: Cathleen

Cathleen — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:13:12 +0000

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.)

By: Cathleen

Cathleen — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:41:53 +0000

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?

By: Cathleen

Cathleen — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:30:02 +0000

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.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:52:43 +0000

Caleb, very very clever! I love it.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:32:53 +0000

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.

By: erique

erique — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:17:49 +0000

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?

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:08:34 +0000

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.