Any way to format text with two stroke lines faster than going manually?

[SebastiaoV]

Hi!
I am doing a magazine where the authors appear among two lines and the text varies in length according to the author name and has two strokes lines at a constant separation. Besides everything has to be center aligned. The way I do it now is going manually by each author and taking two rectangles as distance references. Considering sometimes there are more than 30 writers, it takes a white to do it right and also text boxes does not close exactly where a word ends. Is there any way I could do it with a Script or object Properties or else? 

Here is the design problem

Thanks for your help. 😉
 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Hmm. A Paragraph Rule could be used to create the horizontal black stroke, and Paragraph Border to create the two magenta bars, but the problem is getting the horizontal line to break/hide behind the bars and text.

The only solution I can think of is to give the text a large white outer stroke and adjust things so that that outline blanks out the horizontal line.

Experimenting now...

ETA: Shoot, this is as close as I can get with a single paragraph style. The yellow represents a (white) outline; the blue is Paragraph Shading. But no combination of settings, including "Overprint," will make that horizontal bar stop at the outer edges of the vertical bars. I also tried the Effect 'Outer Glow" but it affects all of the "text" objects at one.

ETA2: Underline and Strikethrough don't work well, either  — underline hides under the "white," strikethrough doesn't, but neither can be extended to the margins in any simple way.

Anyone have a trick, here? The only solution I can come up with is some second object (Para Style, Text Frame, etc.) which would be fussy to manage.

[SebastiaoV]

Hi James,
Thanks for the fast reply and the experiment. It looks like a nice solution. I will try to follow your steps to see how to get the same result. 
By the way, the magenta bars are just for showing the separation, betwen the author name and the black strokes. This is how it goes when printing. 

Best 😉

[FRIdNGE]

Just "Tab + Space + Your Text + Space + Tab"!

(^/)  The Jedi

[FRIdNGE]

I forgot: if the text is already placed, you just need this simple regex to play the game:

(^/)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yep, for just the background line on the paragraph, there are several ways to achieve it, including GREP and line styles. My bad for making the question more complex than it was meant to be.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

And, this works but it's a bit messy:

I can post the actual settings, but —

• Paragraph Style 1 is desired font and size, set to white, set horizontal stroke as desired (specify Black).
  • Set line spacing to zero.
  • Leave empty or use a hard space as placeholder.
• Paragraph Style 2 is everything else: black text, line spacing as desired, side Borders, white Shading (shown in blue).
  • Use Baseline Shift to position the second paragraph atop the one with the horizontal bar.

Ah, I get it with the vertical bars. You should be able to just extend the Paragraph Shading to achieve that effect, no bars required.

Once set up, this should be stable and repeatable, but editing above and below this paired style will be a little wonky with the zero leading and baseline shift.

Ask if you can't sort out what I did here.

[Peter Spier]

The only solution I can think of is to give the text a large white outer stroke and adjust things so that that outline blanks out the horizontal line.

By @James Gifford—NitroPress

I'd use an underline rather than an outline, set to Paper, and adjusted for weight and offset to hide the black paragraph rule...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yeah, there is probably a simpler solution than mine; I misunderstood about the side bars. Just separating the text from a horizontal line is much simpler. Horizontal rule, heavy white text outline should do it. (Underline can't be made to go to the margins, unless I missed something.)

[Willi Adelberger]

A combination od Paragraph rules, above and below and Paragraph Frames and Paragraph Shaddow filling wild do it.

[SJRiegel · Accepted solution]

Paragraph Rules - rule above and rule below, will handle this quite neatly. Rule above is set to Column Width, and Rule Below (in Paper color) is set to Text Width (this covers and obscures the black rule), with Left and Right Indents to offset the rule from the text. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Eh, brilliant! It never occurred to me that P Rules had a stacking order that could be exploited (or that both are, effectively, behind the text).

Only caveat is that it has to be set up for a fixed number of lines, but the OP says all of the instances are 2-line, and creating a 1-line variant would be trivial.

[FRIdNGE]

Or course but not if text frame background color!

(^/)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, of course the recipe is "adjust for document properties." If the background is pink, the Bottom Rule has to be pink... etc.

[FRIdNGE]

... and if the background is a lovely photo of the Milky Way?  😜

(^/)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

...you learn not to get so go[shdar]n fancy. 🙂

Any such thing would be a case for one of the other solutions, like leadered tabs. But this line-stacking trick is a great one to keep in the toolbox for more ordinary layout needs.

[FRIdNGE]

If you want to play (Just for fun!):

https://youtu.be/UXTTOO8UktU?si=OzurXmKbYLYxkZ0_

(^/)

[SebastiaoV]

Thanks SJRiegel for a great solution and also displaying visually how to do it. Best, 😉