I guess it’s easier to show you what I want to achieve than try to explain it 😛
Take a look:
As you can see, there is a Guillemet (French quotation mark) next to the paragraph, centered vertically in relation to the paragraph.
The problem is, I did this with drop caps, setting it to one character and three rows. That means if the paragraph is shorter or longer than three rows, it won’t look like I want it to … So, is there a way to get this large Guillemet next to the paragraph vertically centered, independent of how long the paragraph is? The Guillemet should always have the same size, rather than scaling with the length of the paragraph! (I’m hoping for a solution that works purely based on paragraph and/or character styles, meaning no manual tweaking is required for each paragraph I want to use this with) … Thanks!
Edit: I can’t use an individual textframe for each of these paragraphs, since I need them to stay in the primary textframe …
Answer
That’s not something you can do with regular paragraphs of arbitrary length, but it’s easily done using a two-column table.
Set up the table so that the text offset top and bottom is exactly half your normal paragraph spacing. The right column will contain your text.
The left column will the Paragraph Style for your guillemet, with the cell style set to center text vertically.
It takes a bit of fiddling with offsets to get the spacing right so it fits with the run of the main copy, so save the table and cell styles when you have it set the way you want!
Here’s a demo, using a Body Copy paragraph style that’s the default plus 8 pt Space Before.
This uses an overall table style with a “Space Before” setting the same as the Body Copy style, a cell style for the guillamet (which has its own paragraph style), a cell style for the regular rows of copy and a separate cell style for the last row, to remove the bottom offset.
Given what you’re trying to accomplish, you won’t want a bullet paragraph to split across pages. Since tables can split across pages, but individual rows can’t, that’s built into the workflow.
The table will of course move automatically with the flow of text.
[Late Edit] I have now described this setup much more fully in this article on InDesignSecrets.com.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : MoritzLost , Answer Author : Alan Gilbertson