How many of us still have “e-gauges” next to our keyboards? I have a great 12 inch one from Agfa Compugraphics that has points, pica, inches, line weights, line spacing and type sizes…all on clear plastic…and I use it all the time.

Again, thanks for the list!!!

Your lists are great with useful, interesting and fun “stuff”. I do, however, have one huge complaint. You have to stop recommending books. Some people are addicted to drugs or alcohol…I’m addicted to books! Because I am of the type-specing, galley, rubber cement, 8 typeface, EditWriter 7500, ain’t never heard of WYSIWYG cause they haven’t invented it yet, era…I had to order the type specing book. It will be here tomorrow.

I grouse but please keep writing, and recommending…I’ll keep buying and reading!

Generally, I use left justification as I am typesetting books. On occasion I do use ragged right for certain types of text in the books. And, although I used equal L/R indents in my example, depending on the element, the left might be indented 36 points and the right 24 points, or some other combination.

So, I’m not really sure how to answer your question. If it were the ideal situation, I would like to be able to set the left and right parameters based on the parameters of the paragraph style adding 3 points to each side. That is, if the L/R settings for the text were 36/24, the frame would be 33/21, that is, using the +/- system.

One of the nice things about your script was that if I selected several adjoining paragraphs and applied the text style to them, the frame continuously covered all of the paragraphs. With that in mind, how would it work if the standard was the longest line of text and I chose 5 bulleted items whose lengths were unequal?

Actually it was a bigger task for me to make sure it fit the column and not the text width. If your text is indented 36pt in both left and right, and you run ragged right text, would you want the box to be added from column +/- the 36pt or would you like it to be added from the longest line of the text? Alternatively I could add support for a “negative padding”? What would be easiest to control for you?

For me, where this fails is when I need to have the frame behind text that is indented left and right from the column margin. For example, if a standard paragraph runs the full column width, say 144 points, but the text I need framed runs only 72 points wide and is indented 36 points on both left and right, the script creates a frame that is 144 points wide, not 72 points + x points on either side. Perhaps there is a way around this, but I couldn’t find one with the script.

Elsewise, the script works great.