Put Lines to Left and Right of a Heading

David Blatner

13

Ann wrote:

I’ve hunted and hunted for a way to make … a centered heading with a line on either side.

There are two ways to create this effect: the traditional, easy way (which works in limited situations); and a slightly more difficult method (which works in almost all situations).

The Easy Way to Put Lines on Both Sides of a Heading

The easy, traditional method is to apply two paragraph rules to the text (typically as part of the paragraph style):

• a thin rule above with a slight offset to center it vertically on the line
• a thicker rule below set to the background color (normally Paper white), that “knocks out” part of the line above. To do this, you need a negative offset, a negative left and right indent, and the width set to Text

See the examples below:

This method is fast and easy, but it has one negative result: it only works over a solid background the same color as the “knock out” rule… when it’s over another color, or an image, the knock-out just leaves a white or colored gap:

The Harder but More Flexible Way to Put Lines on Both Sides of a Heading

Fortunately, there’s another way. This time, we’re going to set up the paragraph style to be flush left, rather than centered:

Now, to center the heading, and add a little space between it and the line, we’ll add some text. In this case, I’ll use the Find/Change dialog box (GREP tab) to find everything in the heading paragraph style, and replace it with the same text, but with a tab and en space before it, and an en space and a right-align tab after it.

The code for “everything” is .+ and the code for the replacement is \t~>$0~>~y so it looks like this:

Notice that in the image above, I have used Find Format to limit the scope to just my heading paragraph styles.

Next, I need to change my heading paragraph style by adding a center-aligned tab stop in the middle of the column width:

And I add a Nested Style that applies a “strikethrough” character style to the tab characters:

I could have used a GREP Style instead of Nested Styles, but my general philosophy is that if you can do it with nested styles, try that first.

The result is a tab with a thick strike-through, followed by a blank en space, then the heading, then another en space, then another struck-out tab to the end of the line:

There are, of course, many other solutions to this problem: You could anchor lines into the text; you could use underscores instead of strikethrough; you could use scripting; you could add custom strokes with a huge gap and convert each heading into a table cell… but I think these two options are the simplest options. But let me know below if you can think of others!