From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adding rules above or below - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Adding rules above or below

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- [Instructor] Many designs call for a line, also called a rule to sit above or below a paragraph, especially a heading, and you could spend all day drawing lines with a line tool, but you would be a lot better off using InDesign's "paragraph rules" feature. In this magazine document from my exercise files, I'm going to double click on this heading over here and zoom into 400% with command or control four. Let's add some space above and below this paragraph by switching to the paragraph formatting mode and then changing the space before to say, 10 points. Then I'll hit the tab key and type four points for space after. Now, this heading still looks kind of dull. I want my eye to be more drawn to it, so I'm going to put a rule above it. To do that, let's head over to the right side of the control panel and open its menu. Here, we can choose "paragraph rules" way down here, or you could press the shortcut, which is command, option, J, or control, alt, J. Now this paragraph rules dialect box is actually kind of two different dialect boxes combined into one. You can choose each of them from the pop-up menu here. Here's rule above, and here's rule below. You can only see one at a time, but a single paragraph can have both if you want. I want to create a rule above the text, so I'll select that. Now I'll turn on the "rule on" checkbox. We should also turn on the preview checkbox so that we can see what we're doing while we work. Let's move this dialect box out of the way a little bit. Right now we have a one point solid line set to the same color as the text right at the baseline of the paragraph. Let's change that. First, I'll choose a different color. Let's choose this blue color out of this pop-up menu. Next, let's make it thicker, maybe five points, and now we need to change the offset. The offset is how far away from the text baseline this rule should be. You can type a value, but I usually just press the up arrow keys on my keyboard until I find a value that works for me. So now it's above the text. You can also change how wide this rule should be, like where it should start and stop. For example, let's change the left indent to say, five points. I'll hit tab, and you can see that the rule moved in. Now it's indented. Or you can turn this around and change this to a negative number, minus five points. When I hit tab, you can see that the line actually gets pulled out into the margin. The other way you can control how wide this rule should be is the width popup menu. Right now it's set to column, so it's going to go from one margin edge to the next, but you can change this to text. Now the rule only goes to the edge of the text. InDesign is smart enough to know where the boundaries of the text are and however long that line of text is, that's how long the rule will be too. Now, like I said, if you want to, you can also add a rule below. The same paragraph can have both a rule above and a rule below if you want, but in this case, I think it's looking good, so I'll click "okay". Adding lines or rules to your text can definitely help you draw the reader's eye to just where you want them to look, and to separate one section from another. I'm just glad that it's so easy to create these with InDesign paragraph rules feature.

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