Rulers

Tip 3 of the InDesign workout

Having rulers follow your text is a paragraph option in InDesign and can be found in the Paragraph options.

Put your cursor in a paragraph, select the paragraph option in your option bar and on the righthand side click on the black triangle, there you'll find 'Paragraph Rules'.

You have two options: Rule Above and Rule Below. To activate click in the check box, you can use either or both.

Now you're options become available. They are the type of stroke, the thickness, the colour (watch out only colours that are in your swatches are available), the percentage of the colour (not the transparancy), overprint (handy for hairlines). When you use a dashed line as your type you can colorise the gaps also.

inDesign looks at these rulers as a text object so basic paragraph settings like left and right indenting can be used. Also the width of the rule can be changed (text or column).

One option is left: offset. InDesign draws the stroke on the baseline of your text, so the offset is basically the same as a baseline shift. With preview checked you can see how the rule behaves (maybe you have to add some space between paragraphs to make room for the rule).

Now when you're text changes these rules stay with your paragraph and you don't have the replace them by hand.

Extra tip: with the indent options you can go negative as well, this means that your rule will extend outside of the textframe.

So far so good but what when you want to have a vertical rule, just to highlight a portion of your text?

Now the table funtion comes in handy.

Select your textportion just upto the last character (be sure no to select a hard return).
Go to menu table and select 'convert text to table'. Now use my previous table tip about the table setup. Select no stroke for the top, right and bottom strokes and a stroke type and width for your left stroke.
In the file above I added a colour to the cell and even added a cell to place the picture.

Isn't that handy?