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Designing the Adobe InDesign Way
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Underlines and strikethroughs can be a great way to draw attention to content in a paragraph, but why stick to the default formatting? In this recipe, we will show you how to apply underlines and strikethroughs, and then subsequently change the formatting to match your exact needs. You will even learn a neat little trick using underlines to create a highlighter pen effect.
In order to complete this recipe, simply open InDesign on your system and create a new document with 12 pages, as shown in the Creating a new document recipe in Chapter 1. You will also need to add a text frame containing some placeholder text, as shown in the Creating text frames and adding placeholder text recipe. Finally, you will need the Control panel set to show character formatting rather than paragraph formatting options, as shown in step 1 of the Adjusting character formatting recipe.
In order to use and format underlines and strikethroughs on your text, follow these steps:
Figure 2.16: Underline and strikethrough options in InDesign
Figure 2.17: Underline Options dialog box
In this instance, we will change the Colour setting to blue and adjust the Weight setting to 2 pt to make the line a little thicker.
Tip
If you would like to create a highlighter pen effect, simply apply an underline, switch the Colour setting to yellow, make the Offset value a negative number until the line is vertically in the middle of the text, and then increase the Weight value until it is the same height as the text. You can simply adjust the offset to fine-tune the positioning. See the text marked as E in Figure 2.16.
On rare occasions, I come across somebody who, for a variety of reasons, can’t Alt-/Option-click on the buttons to bring up the Underline Options and Strikethrough Options dialog boxes. If you encounter this, you can also open the Options dialog box from the drop-down menu at the top right of the InDesign program window, as marked by A in Figure 2.18:
Figure 2.18: Alternative method of accessing strikethrough and underline options
Change the font size
Change margin width
Change background colour