InDesign Paragraph Rules trick

If you’ve ever wanted to place a box around a paragraph in the middle of a container of text, you know what a pain it can be.

Keith Gilbert shared a way to do this using paragraph rules. It is a multi-step procedure to set up this trick, but once you’ve created it and saved it in a paragraph style, it is effortless to use.

If you only need to do this once or twice in a brochure or pamphlet, it’s probably easier to just place a separate text container inside the existing text container where you want it. But if you plan on applying this effect fairly often in a long document of text (such as an annual report, magazine, or instruction manual), this is probably going to be a real time saver.

This tip is a few years old, but still works. I’m actually surprised Adobe didn’t add a feature that does this automatically back when they added Paragraph Shading; another effect we used to manually create using InDesign’s Paragraph Rules feature.