Text frame with a left or right side border only...

[Matthew A]

Heres an example layout I have been testing in order to get to grips with layout rules...

Orange lines = manually placed, happy to keep dong these as-is.

Green line — this is manually placed but this really seems like a dumb solution, I woudl love some advice as to the most flexible / solid layout solution to add rules to either the left or right side of a text box!



I could do this with custom paragraph styles, using a right-side para border, but it would be MUCH easier and flexible if there was a way to control text frame borders!! Then we coudl just use object styles...

Has anyone come across a solution (maybe even a plugin?) that can give us fine-grained control over borders?


thanks for your time!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, inherently (that is, directly connected to the layout element) it can be done easily... on export, using CSS control. But that doesn't help much in the layout or for any form of print.

Manual lines are one solution and the only really flexible one. Paragraph borders could be used but it would get complicated (messy) if there is more than one style or if there are illustrations, as you have.

I'm not sure even script level control has that granularity... but cue the wizards anyway.

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[Laubender]

"Orange lines = manually placed, happy to keep dong these as-is."

Hi @Matthew A ,

keep them manually placed. Also the orange ones.

Well. Perhaps show the page with frame edges visible and invisible text showing as well.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Matthew A]

Here goes...

[TᴀW]

If you need a line on one side only, you could use a gradient fill with both tab stops set at 99%:

(Actually, this would also work if you needed 2 lines, one on the left and one on the right, or one on the top and one on the bottom, but not if you need 3 lines or 2 perpendicular lines. And 4 lines is, of course, built in.)

[Matthew A]

Interesting tactic!
But that would not allow me to set the line to text ascender / baselines... So far paragraph borders seem to be the most flexible option and accurate, although I havent yet looked at tables...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yeah, as long as you set up the paragraph border styles carefully, and probably have right/left/none versions of each style in the flow, it should work fine. Just complicated and messy.

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[Matthew A]

Indeed — what I really want it per-side stroke control, as per the likes of Figma, which does this trick very nicely... c'mon Adobe 🙂

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well... in my experience going back to the late 1980s with design and layout software, there is invariably one package that is head and shoulders (if not waistline and thighs) above all the rest in power, scope, industry use AND support... and several alternatives that are mostly noted for having neat but rather fiddly features the big boy doesn't. (Or being free.)

Choose wisely. 🙂

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[Matthew A]

Ha! I am not advocating using Figma for this kind of work, in many ways Figma is a nightmare 🙂

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Tables might do the trick but they are... difficult to control across page breaks, at least in combination with controlled top and bottom margins.

What about this: use paragraph borders, and then a layer with white masking elements. Right back to the blueline-and-chromalith days, but it would work and might be simpler overall than trying to beat all these features into doing exactly/nothing more than what you want.

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[rob day]

Then we coudl just use object styles...

Hi @Matthew A , Seems like you should be able to set up an Object Style that includes a right only Paragraph Border:

[Matthew A]

Hi Rob — sure, that is what I am doing at the moment... but... imagine we have two or three useful para styles for a given text box in a 3-col layout... lets say body text, intro paragraph and a quote style...

Depending on what we do with the layout we would then potentially need a left + right + both-sides para style for each 'main' paragraph style version. So nine different paragraph styles needed where usually Id only have three!

And this isnt even a particularly detailed layout, you can see how we'd end up multiplying paragraph styles very rapidly here... which I am fully expecting to do!

It would be SO much simpler if we could simply assign borders per edge instead of the rather basic Indesign tools we currentyl have. Or if we could perhaps assign border on the object-level...?

[rob day]

Do a feature request.

It could also be scripted by drawing the line and grouping it with the text frame. The creation and positioning of the line would be easy, develping a dialog to handle the color, stroke, and offsets would be more work.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Maybe I'm missing something. Where does an object style come into this setup? A para style with a right border, yes, but not an Object Style, right?

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[rob day]

In my example the Object Style includes the Paragraph Style with the Border, but that doesn’t help with @Matthew A ’s style bloat problem

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, so it's still a paragraph style solution. Didn't think there was anything at the object style level that was more granular than the frame border styles.

All just proof again that ID will do anything, if you are able to set it up. 🙂

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[Laubender]

@rob day said: "It could also be scripted by drawing the line and grouping it with the text frame. The creation and positioning of the line would be easy, develping a dialog to handle the color, stroke, and offsets would be more work."

Hm. Look into Marc Autret's InGutter 2 script to see how much work that can be:

Getting Started with InGutter 2 for InDesign CS4-CC [UPDATE]
Marc Autret, July 09, 2013

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2012/09/getting-started-with-ingutter2

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Matthew A]

Thanks for all the thoughts here!

I have seen theres a live feature request that covers this issue — please add your votes too!

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/20396803-al...