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Tip of the Week: Making Callout Arrows Easier to See

Cari Jansen
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This tip was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on March 3, 2016.

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You’ve turned a line into an arrow using InDesign’s Strokes panel. But perhaps you can’t see the arrow clearly over a dark background, so you want to add a small white outline. Unfortunately, you can’t add two stroke colors to one object in InDesign. So cheat a little and add an Outer Glow effect instead! This creates the appearance of a dual stroke. You’ll probably want to set the blending mode to Normal and Opacity to 100%. To remove the fuzzy edge on the glow, change the Spread value to 100%.

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Cari Jansen
Cari Jansen is based in Perth, Western Australia and works throughout Australia as a technical writer/editor, print, electronic (EPUB, Kindle, Tablets, Adobe DPS) and eLearning publishing consultant, software trainer, course developer, and public speaker. She's an Adobe Certified Instructor (Adobe Acrobat, Digital Publishing Suite, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop), Adobe Certified Expert (Adobe Captivate and Muse) and an Adobe Community Professional and Adobe Training Partner based in Australia. In 2008 she founded the Perth inDesign User Group, which she ran until late 2013. You'll meet Cari at industry events, both as an attendee and speaker, speaking on a range of print and digital publishing technologies and trends. To learn more about Cari, visit her web-site: www.carijansen.com. You can also follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and YouTube
  • Kristen K says:
    May 17, 2016 at 7:43 am

    Thanks for this tip! I followed all your guidelines, but when I turn the arrow at an angle, the edges get fuzzy all the way around. Is there any way to reduce that?

    Thanks!

    Reply
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