InDesign Split Text

[katherineg66834923]

I am currently working on a Chapter for a Book.  I have flowed about 100 pages of text into the Chapter.  There are parts within my chapter (that we refer to as Call Outs) that I would like to highlight with grey background.  Do I need to break the text box to do this? If so, how? and if not, how can I make a grey box around certain parts of my text?

This book is a text book the call outs are text that breaks from the normal body text to talk about something related that should be highlighted.  After the call out it goes back to regular body text. 

Thank you,

[winterm · Accepted solution]

Sounds like you need a Paragraph Shading. Here is​ a short description how it works, one of the many available on the net.

[katherineg66834923]

THIS IS ALMOST PERFECT.  how do I get rid of the white lines between paragraphs? The Title is a para graph style I added shading to, the ellipsis has its own style and the headings and body have their own styles.  I added shading to all of them but the

white lines in between?

See below:

Here is a screen shot of what my settings are in shading

[maxwithdax]

It is adding the whitespace because of your "space before" and "Space after" settings. You could set your insets instead to get the same spacing. But then you would just need a new shaded style for those elements if you also needed the same spacing when it is unshaded.

- Dax

[winterm]

Did you try adjust offset top/bottom?

[katherineg66834923]

That worked!!  thank you

[maxwithdax]

Just realize that when you do this to the top and your shaded paragraph appears at the start of a page or column, the shaded part may be above your page margins.

[katherineg66834923]

I see what you mean...it cuts at the margin where text flows to next page....and cuts off before hanging characters like g, y, p etc.

hmmmm

[katherineg66834923]

Better image of bottom margin on flowed text....

Is there an easy fix for this...

[katherineg66834923]

I did that and that gets rid of the white spaces...but when the text flows to next page the top and bottom margins do not have enough grey to cover?  Any thoughts?

top margin. 

bottom below

I tried not snapping text to grid which works on bottom margin sometimes but not every time.  I actually like the text not snapped to grid in the grey box.  Just need to figure out how to have it cover the text better on bottom and flowed top margins.

[maxwithdax]

Fixing that is where you use the top and bottom inset on the paragraph shading.

-Dax

[winterm]

Well, none of my quick tests look so bad as your screen shots, but yes - it may require some additional playing with settings - Top/Bottom offsets, maybe Edge. Final look also depends on how your paragraphs are formatted (space before/after). However, InDesign doesn't have a built-in feature closer to your needs than this.