Background color on text

[driesv10340871]

Hello,

For the cover of a magazine I want to place the titles with a semi-tranparant background.

First picture: what I want to achieve (made in illustrrator)

Second picture: what I have so far. I want the black background to be transparant. This background is created by tweaking the underlining options so they appear behind the text (not sure if this is the right trick).

Thanks!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

One approach would be to use InDesign's Paragraph Shading feature (in the list of each Paragraph Style's menu), but I don't think transparency is supported, only tint levels.

I don't believe there is any solution in which such shading could be integral to the text; ID has no features that allow assigning transparency to only one part of an element. (That is, if the text is 100% solid, any background, under/overlining, border etc. must also be completely solid.)

If it's for a magazine cover where some manual composition is both expected and a reasonable way to achieve the layout, simply using a shape around the text, such as a series of rectangles of defined height, and assigning them or their layer the desired opacity would be the first approach I can think of. There are other ways to combine text and shapes and levels of opacity, but all are variations on that.

[jmlevy]

You could use 2 text frames with a black bakground and lower the background opacity of each frame.

Edit: just to be clear, I wrote “2 frames” because I saw 2 lines of text in your screenshot, but in my example one frame is enough.

[driesv10340871]

Thx, I'll test boath approaches and see what works best 🙂