While doing heavy make-up of book texts I often need to get in a line or to space out a line. Doing this without having countless paragraph overrides (with the danger that by clicking "clear override" or applying a script everything would be lost) the only possibility so far is to make numerous paragraph copies, e.g., "body", "body+5", "body+10", "body-5" etc.
A possible solution could be to have the paragraph style definition with some kind of "ranges", maybe "Tracking: 0 - +30" with a default value "0". And the actual value could be selected in a panel. Hopefully someone has a better idea how to implement this better.

If I specify a border & use just the 'top' as a horizontal rule with the idea to have it appear only on either side of a line of text, there isn't an option to do that or for the shading to knock-out the 'border' or have one in front of the other so it would be handy to be able to specify that one is on top of the other & the option to knock it out or a gap size. I've achieved the desired effect in the 2nd image with a white stroke but that doesn't work well if there is a 2nd line of text - as it starts to white out the top line & then you can't get enough of a gap between the first & last words on that line.

Often we need to apply styling, such as a shaded background, to not just an individual paragraph, but to a SECTION which is composed of multiple paragraphs.

There is no easy way to do this via style sheets. Duplicating all the individual paragraph styles again and adding the 'shaded' properties to each one is way too tedious and fussy.

It would be nice if we could have SECTION STYLES. This would function like a 'wrapper' encompassing multiple paragraphs. That way we could select a passage of text and easily apply things like shading, borders, and indents to it. See attached example.

I have set up some paragraph styles in my InDesign document that have space-before and space-after set on them. Some of the styles are for headers. When the headers precede a regular paragraph, I want the space to be there, but when they precede another header, I want there to be less space. In web development, I can write rules in CSS that say things like this:

p { margin-top:10px; }
h2 + p { margin-top:5px }

I am able to make the margin-top narrower on a <p> tag that is immediately preceded by an <h2> tag, but otherwise, it's wider.

I’m looking for a mechanism to do something similar in InDesign so that if my heading level 2 paragraph style is before another heading paragraph style, it has less space-after than when it is before a regular paragraph. It would be really great if Adobe could add a feature that allows you to define a paragraph style spacing based on which style comes before or after it.

Keyboard shortcut for adopting paragraph style

I see on this forum that at one time InDesign offered this shortcut:
1. Using the text tool, click in a paragraph.
2. Hold Option & Shift, then click a Style Sheet formatted paragraph
3. The paragraph that had the text tool in it is now formatted to the [Option/Shift] clicked paragraph's Style Sheet.

I just tried it in ID CC 2017 with no luck. Now the Notes palette opens.

Please bring it back. It was one of QkXP's best features, a major time saver. Way faster than opening the Styles palette and clicking on a choice.