Can all column rules' height be re-adjusted at once after changing the copy text font size?

[Chris P. Bacon]

I decreased my copy text font size and now my column rules are exceeding their previous upper boundary.

So now do i have to delete them and re-apply all my column rules, is there any adjustment shortcut or function?

[Chris P. Bacon]

At the green arrows the offset is forcing the ruler to end at the boundary of the text.

But otherwise I have no idea why are rulers exceeding text boundaries.

[Laubender]

Hi @Chris P. Bacon ,

hm, I thought, I gave the answer already somewhere else in one of your threads.

The starting point of the ruler is tied to the first character in your text frame.

Example:

That's a conceptual flaw in the feature.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Chris P. Bacon]

Have you seen the latest screenshot that I provided?

It does not contain dropcaps.

You again made up your own example, containing drop caps.

In your examples, it's always the drop caps that cause that.

But in my example there are no drop caps, so the top of the first character of the text frame is where the ruler should end.

But it doesn't. 

[Chris P. Bacon]

Namely, my pull quote area does not contain dropcaps so your reply is not valid there, yet the rulers extend inside the pull quote area.

And the top of your drop cap in your example is above of the copy text x height, but my text x height is the same as my drop cap x height.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Could you please use my file that I provided in my latest post, as a demonstration?

Thanks.

[Laubender]

Hi @Chris P. Bacon ,

the sample in the upper right of my screenshot has no dropcaps at all.

Just a character with a different point site and some baseline shift applied.

So to work around the issue you have to isolate your first character in a different text frame and thread it to the main text frame. With text wrap applied.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Chris P. Bacon]

And are people who are prudcing magazines or books supposed to do that all the time to get the rulers right?

[Laubender]

@Chris P. Bacon said:

"And are people who are prudcing magazines or books supposed to do that all the time to get the rulers right?"

They simply do not use the feature.

Sometimes they use a script like the one from Marc Autret, InGutter 2, or they draw graphic lines and fit their position and length.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[rob day]

Hi Uwe, If I check the info button next to Column Rules in Text Frame Options it reads Runs from Ascent of the first line to the Descent of the last line of the text frame.

When there is a drop cap, it looks to me like the Column Rules start at the Ascent line of the drop cap character—the ascent line is defined by the type designer and may or may not be set exactly on the font’s ascender.

When there’s no drop cap it looks like the highest ascent line in the first line is used, but again fonts’ ascent lines can vary relative to the ascender:

Looks like Chris’s other problem isn’t related to the Column Rule Start—he has a text frame that is wrapping, so the text frame (not its text) determines where the rule breaks.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I masked those excess inner parts of the lines with paragraph shading stored in the object style.

[Chris P. Bacon]

With paragraph shading offsets, more precisely. But they are getting close to clipping out the text too, so they cannot trum the lines exactly to the x height.

[Chris P. Bacon]

It's stored in the paragraph style not object style.

[Chris P. Bacon]

reported this

[Peter Spier]

In the file you posted above the problem is caused by your stacked frame heights. The rules are extending to the bottom of that teaser text frame

[Laubender]

With your document "Long Distance Itinerary Cyclists copy.indd" open, my take on the technical side of InDesign is this:

[1] Do not use the Column Rules feature of the Text Frame Options. Use graphic lines instead.

[2] For call out text use two frames: One for the text and one for the text wrap. That's more flexible.

[3] Allow text in articles to end on a different line than the other columns.

[4] Do not (mis)use parent pages for your layout work. Currently all your layouts are done on Parent A named "A-Master" and Parent B named "B-Master".

[5] Text cannot flow from page to page. Text frames are not threaded.

[6] Document history shows that your document initially was created in InDesign CS6 in 2013. The exact version is 8.0.0.370, the initial version of InDesign CS6 not bug fixed at all. So I wonder if this causes some crashes on the document later in its life. Time to export the document to IDML, open the IDML file as document and save it with a new name to prevent future corruption of the file.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Chris P. Bacon]

Thanks.

But when I give it the new name, I should re-save it as INDD, as that is the newer format?

[Chris P. Bacon]

Graphic lines - you mean to manually set the start and end point of each of my rulers by drawing lines?

[Peter Spier]

It is important to go through .idml as an intermediate step to clear out minor corruptions and unnecessary crud left over from previous sessions and versions.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I have pushed my files thorugh the IDML format, thanks, that stripped them down from the bloat successfully.

I don't want to use external scripts for my rulers, I marked the bug as an urgency, I hope they will solve it.

The rulers don't account for the situation when a text object like pull quote is placed between copy text columns with offsets and wrapped.

They might be able to modify the code to account for that and trim the rulers at the closest x height and baseline, always. In theory it should be possible for the code to detect the closest baseline and x height and do not extend until the offset boundary.

It seems that the rulers only account for image objects, as I observed that most people don't have their pull quotes as a separate text object, they only fix it with paragraph styles. But then you cannot move them in between columns, and they cannot be moved around.

[Chris P. Bacon]

But I can consider hand drawing the lines, as you said. 

But that is just not a flexible way to maintain or eventually migrate the design.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You do realize that when you re-use the design, all of the words are going to be different. Do you have a strategy for coping with that? Maybe a script?

—

[Chris P. Bacon]

Whatever I do with my designs, the rulers should be a one click solution, removing them or (re)adding them, if using the rulers function of the text frame options.

If they fix it, it will be a one click solution.

If not, I will keep masking the excess ruler ends with paragraph shading.

It's more handy than to hand draw the rulers.

[Chris P. Bacon]

But, I don't know how white paragraph shading is printing, if printers don't have white ink?

Will the white shading be visible?

Because the paper is not perfectly white, it's not #ffffff.

[Peter Spier]

There is no "white" color in InDesign. There is [Paper], which means put no ink here, and by default looks like white.  Using paragraph shading in [Paper] effectively removes any other content behind the shaded area. You are not printing in white, you are simply not printing anything in that area.

The primary reason, from my perspective, for having this as an option for paragraph shading is to allow you to knock out an area for text over a colored background or image.

[Peter Spier]

I think maybe storing an assortment of pre-drawn rules in a library might be a time-saver (a single rule, a group of two and a group of three to cover the various configurations). Drag them onto the page and adjust the length. I fail to see how paragraph sahding can be a viable solution with paragraphs that cross columns.