Merge consecutive borders over several pages

[martinr29884776]

Hey, InDesign is driving me crazy, I hope you can help me with this.

For a part of my text I use the option "Merge Consecutive Borders and Shading with same Settings".

Sadly it does not always work if the text is split to several pages. The Top and Bottom Stroke should not appear if the same paragraph or another paragraph with equal border settings continues on the next page. This works correct, if a single paragraph is split. But if a new paragraph starts on the next page the the Bottom and Top Borders interrupt the design. 

So if the next Paragraph has the same style I can cheat it by just changing the line instead the paragraph. (I don´t know how this is called usually in English.) But if there comes another Paragraph Style, I can´t even do that.

So do you know a way to make the borders work correctly?

Thanks in advance!

[Laubender]

Hi Martin,

some screenshots would help.

Hidden characters and frame edges showing.

Don't know if you experimented with that:

For paragraph shading there is an option to clip the shading to the frame.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[martinr29884776]

Hi Uwe,

I just noticed, there is the option for Shading. But it did not help with the border. However, the Shading works well, so I don´t believe it can solve this issue.

Here is an example of my text. There is a paragraph at the end of the left site and another one at the start of the left one. And the text is interrupted by the border.

But it has to look like this. (In this example I could do the trick with a manual line-break instead of inserting a usual new paragraph):

Another case where I need open borders is with a graphic inside. For this I inserted a placeholder-paragraph with similar border settings, but since there has to be a new paragraph after, the bottom border remains.

So is there any way I can do this with InDesign?

[Laubender]

Hi Martin,

when looking at your screenshots I cannot see a way to get this fixed properly.

For that the shading options missing some features that can control the end and the start while a frame break or a column break is at work. Indepentently of the start and the end of the shading elsewhere.

You could sign in to InDesign Prerelease to discuss this further or you can make a feature request just here:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/

When done come back and post the link to the request so that we can up-vote the case.

I'll definitely support it.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[martinr29884776]

Thanks Uwe, but right now I´m in a big hurry to get the text finished till the launch of our book. That´s why I cannot wait for future features. So for now I hope I will get a solution from one of the other advices.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Martin:

How about adjusting the keep options to disallow paragraphs from ending at the bottom of a column?

Before:

After:

~Barb

[martinr29884776]

Hi Barb, I still had the "Keep Lines together"-option activated in some paragraph styles. In combination with the "Keep with next"-rule this leads to some rather unnatural line breaks.

However I could at least improve the text flow by deleting the Keep options in some of the problematic paragraph styles.

[Barb Binder]

Well, good. I'd also like to see feature improvements, but hopefully this will work for now.

~Barb

[Laubender]

Hi Martin,

maybe there is a combination of paragraph borders and paragraph shading that could work:

Together with text frame insets. Here the insets are all set to value 0:

Followed by some insets set:

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

EDITED: Rules > Borders

[martinr29884776]

Hmm i am not sure if I applied all options as you thaught. But as far as I cann see, this also only affects the shading and not the border 😞

[Laubender]

Hi Martin,

I'd definitely experiment a bit with text frame insets. Plus the option to crop shading to the frame ( or insets ).

You are right, that does not effect the border directly. But it can have a compensating effect.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Laubender]

Hi Martin,

hm… All in all I think I found a solution for that detail: The shading is following the border with a distance.

The solution: A custom stroke style!

Ok. This is not 100% flexible because the custom style has to have two colors: Black and Paper.

The custom stroke style is defined like that:

And the it is applied like that with [Black] and [Paper]. The overall weight is 3 Pt in this sample. So the [Black] part of it is 1.5 Pt:

That should work…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

EDITED: Rule > Border

[Laubender]

Hi Martin,

then inspect the suggestions above.

I think a workaround could be done.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[martinr29884776]

I guess there are possiblities, but I don´t have so much experince to know how the options affect each other. So till now I haven´t found a good solution with the border rules. Maybe I didn´t understand which were the specific rules you meant to set.

The (really unprofessional) workaround that seems to work is deleting the Keep Options and a lot of manual linebreaks in some fancy mini-character style.