- [Narrator] Many designs call for a line, also called
a rule, to sit above or below a paragraph, especially
a heading. You could spend all day drawing lines
with the line tool, but you'd be a lot better off using
InDesign's paragraph rules feature. In this magazine
document from my exercise files, I'm going to select
this heading down here by double clicking on it.
Then, I'll zoom in to 200% by pressing command or
CTL 2. 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, I need to open the paragraph rules dialogue box.
To get there, I need to go all the way to the right side of
my control panel and click on this little pop-up menu.
There it is. Paragraph rules. Or you could press
command option J or CTL ALT J. Now the paragraph rules
dialogue box is actually two different dialogue boxes
kind of combined into one. You choose each of them from this
pop-up menu up here. This is rule above, and this is
rule below. In this case. I want to add a rule above.
Then, I'll turn on the rule on check box. I am also going
to turn on the preview check box down here so that I
can see what I am doing. I'll move the dialogue box out
of the way a little bit. Right now, I've got a one-point
solid black line right at the baseline of the text. That's
probably not what I want. Let's change it. First, I am gonna
change the color of this rule. I'll try this light green
color. Next, I'm gonna make that rule a little thicker,
maybe five points instead of one. Now, let's change
the offset. I'm gonna press the tab key a few times to jump
over to that field. The offset is how far away from the text
baseline this rule should be. I usually just press the
up arrow key on my keyboard a few times until it
looks right. Now it's above the text. I can also change how
wide this rule should be, not how thick, but how wide.
For example, I'm going to change the left indent to
five points. When I hit tab, you can see that the left edge
moved in five points. Alternatively, I could turn it around
and make it negative five points. Let's try that. This way,
the line actually gets pulled out into the margin. Now the
other way I can control how wide this rule should be is with
this width pop-up menu. Right now, it's set to column.
It's going from one margin edge to the next. But if I change
this to text, then the rule goes only 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. In this case, I do
want it to fill the whole column. I'll choose that. Now, of
course, if I wanted to, I could add a rule below, too. The
same paragraph can have both a rule above and a rule below.
In this case, I think this is looking good, so I'll click
okay. Adding rules or lines to your paragraphs can
definitely help you draw the readers' eye to 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.