Color background for some text on a line

[gregoryf34450616]

I have a 3 column tabbed layout in an indesign file and I'm trying to figure out the best way to have a color background behind the last tabbed column. For example:

Model Number          Model Description          BUY NOW(This one has a black background, and a link to a website)

What would be the best way to achieve this? I've been messing aroudn with paragraph rules, but they seem to effect the whole line of text.

[Abambo]

You do not want to make a table?

[gregoryf34450616]

Hmm.. That could be an option. Is it possible to have a table flow into a new page like a tabbed layout would? There will be hundreds of lines of content and manually creating tables is not really ideal.

[SJRiegel]

Tabbed text can be automatically converted into a table - it will flow from page to page, and you will automatically have the headers at the top of each page as well.

[John Mensinger · Accepted solution]

gregoryf34450616  wrote

Is it possible to have a table flow into a new page like a tabbed layout would?

Yes.

Personally, I would use a table for something like you describe, but if you prefer to stay with your tabbed layout, you could achieve the background color by setting up and applying a Character Style with a custom underline (set a line weight that makes the line bigger than the text and an offset that places it 'behind' the text).

[Abambo]

you could achieve the background color by setting up and applying a Character Style with a custom underline (set a line weight that makes the line bigger than the text and an offset that places it 'behind' the text).

Yes, that's the other possibility. I used this extensively but for paragraphs, before the "background colour option"...