Chapter 18: Specifying Paragraph Attributes

Overview

Much like an individual character, a paragraph in InDesign is a basic typographic unit. When you create a new text frame and begin typing, you create a paragraph each time you press Return or Enter. A paragraph can be as short as one character or word on a single line or many words strung out over many lines. When you press Return or Enter, the paragraph formats of the preceding paragraph are automatically used for the subsequent paragraph (unless you've created style sheets that automatically change paragraph formats).

In general, paragraph formats control how the lines in the paragraph are constructed . Changing paragraph formats doesn't change the appearance of the individual characters within the paragraph. To do that, you must highlight the characters and modify character-level formats.

Cross-Reference ‚  

This chapter focuses on modifying paragraph-level typographic formats; Chapter 17 focuses on modifying character-level formats. Chapter 20 covers the creation and use of style sheets for both characters and paragraphs.

To select a paragraph, simply click within it. Any change you make to a paragraph-level format will be applied to all the lines in the paragraph. (Unlike character-level formats, you don't have to highlight all the text in a paragraph to modify a paragraph-level format.) If you need to change the paragraph formats of several consecutive paragraphs, you can highlight all the text in all the paragraphs, or you can click anywhere in the first paragraph, drag anywhere within the last paragraph, then release the mouse button.

Just as you can't apply two different colors to a single character, you can't apply conflicting paragraph formats within a single paragraph. For example, you can't specify for one line in a paragraph to be left-aligned and the rest right-aligned. All lines in a paragraph must share the same alignment, indents, tab settings, and all other paragraph-level formats.

As is the case with character formats, there are two ways to apply paragraph formats:

• Use the controls in the Paragraph pane, shown in Figure 18-1, or their keyboard shortcuts.

  
  Figure 18-1: The Paragraph pane.

• Create and apply paragraph-level style sheets.

A paragraph-level style sheet is essentially a text formatting macro that lets you apply several paragraph formats to selected paragraphs in a single operation. If you're working on a multipage publication such as a book, newspaper, magazine, or catalog that repeatedly uses the same basic text formats, you'll definitely want to use paragraph style sheets to handle the bulk of your formatting chores. But even if you use style sheets, you'll probably also use the Paragraph pane to do some manual paragraph formatting.

Cross-Reference ‚  

Tab settings are also a paragraph-level format. See Chapter 21 for a detailed explanation of InDesign's Tabs feature.

Figure 18-1 shows the Paragraph pane. It can have two appearances : If you choose Hide Options from the pop-up menu, the Space Before/After, Drop Cap, and Hyphenate controls are not displayed. You might want to combine the Character and Paragraph panes into a single text formatting pane, as shown here. You can also use the new Control palette's paragraph formatting options, shown in Figure 18-2.

Figure 18-2: The Control palette's paragraph formatting options.

Tip ‚  

If the Type tool is selected and no objects are active, any changes you make in the Paragraph pane become the default settings for the document and are automatically used when you create new text frames .

The Paragraph pane and Control palette provide access to most of InDesign's paragraph-formatting options. (To set tabs, you must open the Tabs pane by choosing Windows ‚ Type & Tables ‚ Tabs or by pressing Shift+ z +T or Ctrl+Shift+T, as Chapter 21 covers.) Several of the options have keyboard shortcuts.