Quick Tip: Create a Highlighted Text Effect With Adobe InDesign

Quick Tip: Create a Highlighted Text Effect With Adobe InDesign

on Feb 2nd 2012 with 6 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Adobe InDesign
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 10 mins

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Sometimes using a highlighted effect text gives a stronger emphasis and style to your design. In this quick tip we are going to achieve that effect by utilizing Paragraph Rules in Adobe InDesign. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Insert text

Create a new document at any size you want. Then insert the text that you are going to highlight. The font I use is Calibri. Change the font size to 48 pt.

Step 2: Disable Hyphenation

It is not good to have a short text with hyphenation. To fix this, click the text frame and then open Paragraph panel (Command + Shift + T). Remove the tick mark before Hyphenate on the panel to disable the hyphenation.

Step 3: Create New Paragraphs

In order to highlight the text later on, make each line in the text frame into a new paragraph. The process is pretty simple; by the beginning of each line, except the first line, press Backspace to remove the space that links the previous line.

Press Enter to put the sentence after the cursor into a new paragraph. Repeat the same process for the next line.

The text structure looks the same with the previous step, but this time the text has three paragraphs. You can check it by using Type > Show Hidden Character (Command + Option + I). You will see a character like a reversed P which indicates the end of the paragraph. It means that the line below the character is a new paragraph. The # character means the end of the text/story.

Step 4: Change Text Color to White

Change the text color to white to make you easier to adjust the Paragraph Rules later. Double click the text frame and then select all paragraph (Command + A). Open Color panel (F6), click the "T" icon on the panel, click the Fill icon which is represented by the square. Set all color values to zero to turn the text color to white. Press Esc when you’re finished changing the color.

Step 5: Open Paragraph Rules

Make sure the text frame is selected, open the Paragraph panel (Command + Option + T). Click on the small icon on the top right corner of the panel and then choose Paragraph Rules (Command + Option + J)

Step 6: Paragraph Rules Set Up

Activate "Preview" to see the live result of the adjustments and then set up the paragraph as follows. Choose Rule Below, and activate Rule On box, Weight: 50 pt, Color: Black, Width: Text, Offset: -13 mm, Left Indent: -3 mm, Right Indent -4 mm.

Press OK when you are finished with the set up. That’s it! You have created the highlight for the text!

Conclusion

You can use this technique for short text like title, quotation, and captions in your layout design to give them more style and emphasis. Experiment with the text size and Paragraph Rules options for different variation.

 
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  • Ida Engmark

    Better to use the ‘underline’ character formatting option.
    This way, you can apply it to single characters and you are not disrupting the structure of your text for pure aesthetic reasons.

    Can also be defined as a default setting for your underline, so all you need to apply it more text, is to hit a button (if you’re too lazy to make an actual character style).

    • Herry Sucahya
      Author

      Using underline option is also good, but the problem is that the underline option does not has “indent” adjustment as explained in step 6. Therefore the underline will start as immediately as the character/text begins.

  • Kellen

    Thanks, this seems basic but it was really helpful for me.

    Is there any way I could save this as a graphic style to automatically apply it to other text?

    • Herry Sucahya
      Author

      Kellen: of course you can save it as Paragraph Style so you can apply it to other text :)

  • http://www.almogshemesh.com Almog Shemesh

    thanks! i always wanted to use this but i’ve never thought doing it this way :) i always tried with background color of the text but it wasn’t good enought.

    thanks for the great tip!

  • http://www.milkbottledesigns.co.uk Ben

    great tip, thanks for sharing, I wondered if there was a better way to do this, I used this same style in a book cover last year but was faffing around with boxes and distributing them evening, bit of a nightmare, now I don’t have to :-)