I’m not talking about making all four corners of a box rounded. That’s easy to do with InDesign. I’m talking about making only a few of the corners rounded. You could draw them by hand with the Pen tool, but that’s kind of time consuming. Instead, use the built-in Script Adobe provides.

  1. Start by drawing a box. Make sure you leave it selected
  2. Next, visit the Scripts panel in InDesign by going to Window>Automation>Scripts
  3. In the panel that comes up, you’ll see a folder in the list called Applications. Open that folder. Now open the Samples folder, followed by the Applescript folder.
  4. You’ll now see a long list of Applescripts you can apply to objects in your InDesign document. Scroll down to CornerEffects.Applescript and double-click it
  5. In the dialog box that pops up, you’re presented with several options. Choose the Corner Type you wish to apply by clicking one of the radio buttons, as well as typing in the size of the effect (you may have to try the script a few times to get the size you want, as there is no live preview available).
  6. Now you simply have to decide which corners you wish to apply the corner effect to. You have several options, including odd, even, first and third, second and fourth, etc. Keep in mind that the corners of the box start at the top left-most point and run clockwise. So in the case of a simple rectangle, the first point is in the top left corner, and the fourth point is in the bottom left corner. Once you’ve made your adjustments, hit OK. That’s it. You now have an editable box with rounded corners as you see at the right.

I like that the effect is editable after the fact. It makes the box more flexible for multiple uses, and it’s much faster than drawing them by hand.