- [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 the line tool,
but you'd be a lot better off
using InDesign's paragraph rules.
In this magazine document from my exercise files,
I'm going to select this heading and zoom in to 400%
by pressing Command + four or Control + four on Windows.
Now let's add some space above and below this
in the control panel
by going to the paragraph controls
and then changing space above to, say, 10 points,
and space after, four points.
That just gives ourselves some room to work with.
Now this heading 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 the control panel menu.
Here we're going to choose paragraph rules,
or you could type Command + Option + J
or Control + Alt + J on Windows.
Now, the paragraph rules dialog box
is actually two different dialog boxes
kind of combined into one.
You choose each of them from this pop-up menu here.
There's a rule above and a rule below.
You can only see one at a time.
I want to create a rule above, so I'll choose that.
Then I'll select the rule on check box.
We should also turn on the preview check box
so that we can see what we're doing.
Let's go ahead and move this dialog box
out of the way a little bit.
Okay, right now we've got a one point solid line
set to the same color as the text
right at the baseline of the text.
So let's change that.
First, let's choose a different color
from the color pop-up menu.
I'll choose this light blue color.
Next, let's make it thicker.
How about five points?
And now we need to change the offset.
The offset is how far from the text baseline
this rule should be.
You can type a value,
but I usually just press the up arrow key
on my keyboard a few times until it looks right.
So now it's above the text.
You can also change how wide this rule should be.
Not how thick, but how wide.
For example, we can change the left indent to,
say, five points.
When I hit the Tab key,
you'll see that the line indents five points.
Or you could turn this around
and make it minus five points.
When I hit Tab,
you'll see that the line actually gets pulled out
into the margin.
Now, the other way that you can control
how wide the rule should be
is with the width pop-up menu.
Right now it's set to column,
so the line will go from one margin edge to the next.
But if you change this to text,
then the rule goes only to the edge of the text.
InDesign is smart enough to know
how long that line of text is,
and that's how long the rule will be, too.
Now, if you want to,
you can also apply 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 this is looking good,
so let's click OK.
Adding rules or lines 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's paragraph rules feature.