How to underline text with a full width line in Adobe InDesign?
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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In this video we're going to look at doing this, where there's a line. It's kind of like an underline, but it's called a paragraph. Goes all the way across to the edge of our column here. Let's go and do that.
So you might be thinking, "Underline? That looks pretty easy. I select the text, I go up to character, and I select underline." And that is true, that is super easy. What we're going to do is a Paragraph, which is slightly different. So we're going to select this top heading here. And we're going to go out to—
We're going to be on 'Paragraph', and we're going to go up to 'Paragraph Rules'. Easiest way to find it is, well easy. See these little three strappy lines here? Click on that, and there's one in there called 'Paragraph Rules'. Hidden away a little bit. What I want to do is, I want a 'Rule Above'. I'd like to make sure 'Preview' is turned on. I'm going to turn this 'Rule' on. And you can see, it's aligned to go all the way to the edge of the column. You can see it here, you can go to the edge of the text, but go back to being that simple things, we just want the column.
We're going to keep it the same color as the text so as the text changes, the line changes. By default, the 'Weight' is 1 pt, quite heavy. I'm going to change mine to maybe 0.5. Nice thinner line. And what we can do, depending on what you want to do, you can indent it from the left, can you see? That's kind of just filling it up to the edge there, that's not what I want to do. Turn it back to 0. Don't click return, get back in there. Back in to 'Paragraph Rules'. And, all the same, except I probably want to offset it at the bottom.
Can you see, it went negative. So I want to get down, just so there's a bit of a gap underneath. And if you felt so, you could change to one of these lines here. I'm going to leave mine as it is, and click 'OK'. Easy, that is Underlining and Paragraph Rules. What we'll do in a little bit is we'll create a style and apply it to all of these other headings at the same time. That's it, see you in the next video.