Tips & Tricks for Creative Professionals and Technical Writers using the Adobe Creative Suite & the Adobe Technical Communications Suite

By Barb Binder

One day, a prospective student called me to discuss the merits of an InDesign/InCopy workflow vs a FrameMaker/Acrobat Mark-up workflow. As a long-time trainer on all four products, he came to the right place…to be convinced to use FrameMaker and Acrobat, or so I thought as the demo began. Two hours later, it all boiled down to being able to highlight text, which neither FrameMaker nor InDesign supports. Acrobat does, but he wanted the highlighting in the source file.

There’s no text highlighting button in InDesign but you can make it happen using underlines. Who knew?

1. If highlighting is the goal, start out by underlining some sample text.
   
   
2. Go back and reselect the underlined text and hold the Alt/Opt key as you click on the Underline button again. In my example, I’m using Adobe Garamond Pro 11/15 so I set the underline specs as follows:
   
3. Pick OK and there you go.
   
4. If you like, you could round the ends use the Rounded End Cap created in the post: Adobe InDesign: Creating New Stroke Styles.
   
5. And definitely save the highlighted text as a Character Style, so that you have one click access to it in the future.
   
6. Makes for very quick and easy highlighting.
   

Have you mastered underlines? Then it’s time to try using Paragraph Rules to define reverse heads.