How to Apply Stroke to Select Sides of a Square/Rectangle in InDesign

[galipio]

Is there an easy way to put a stroke around a square/rectangle but for it only to appear on 3 or 2 sides? Besides using the pen tool and then adding a stroke to two intersecting lines.

I love the Corner Option where you can manually select each corner to customize it (ie, only one corner round vs all). Wish there was this feature for STROKE

Thank you

<Title renamed by MOD>

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

How about one cell Table? 

[Jeffrey_Smith · Accepted solution]

With the Pen Tool, add a point to unwanted side of frame and delete.

[Marija - ED]

Thank you so much for sharing this quick & easy solution!

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi @galipio ,

all doable. But with a little effort:

[1] Add a stroke to the square

[2] Deselect the square. This step is important!

[2] Change the selection tool to the Direct Selection Tool

[3] With that tool click the segment between two path points to select the segment.

Hover over the segment until the mouse cursor adds a / at the side. Then click to select the segment. Note: You'll see no difference when the selection happens, so be careful with the next step.

[4] Use the delete key to remove the selected segment

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[galipio]

Thank you. Using the Direct Selection Tool on the line and then deleting it ...  the was SUPER EASY and way more efficient than the way I was doing it with re-drawing the 3 sides with the pen tool. Thank you for this Easy Option.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It wasn't clear to me from your first post that you didn't need to preserve the rectangle as an object. Having an object/frame that only has strokes on some sides, and having a 2- or 3-line outline object, are two different things. For any use that needs to preserve the object or a frame to hold contents, the overlapping technique I noted would be an option.

[Bill Silbert]

The work arounds offered here are currently the best ways to do what you are asking. If you would like to submit a more automatic way to do this as a feature request for future versions of InDesign go to: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

A completely different approach, which might work better in some layouts, would be to use two rectangles. One would carry the solid color of the outline, the other, just a few points smaller vertically, could be offset to allow three sides (or two) to show while its solid white (or other BG color) fill masks the rest of the underlying object. This could be adapted to almost any combination of outside lines. Probably better for a fixedx, "art" layout than anything involving flowing text, though.