Multiple strokes like Illustrator has
InDesign should have the ability to have more than one stroke on an object the way that Illustrator does. I've wanted this multiple times and now it's come up again with a design that uses a filled frame behind a headline and also a stroke inside the bounding box of the filled frame. To make this design efficient in production, the ideal is for this to be one object with the type in the center, the stroke a controlled distance away and another stroke that is the same color as the fill outside the first stroke. See attached screen shot. Combine this object with the Auto Size feature for a text frame, and you have an object that can be quickly repurposed with different text while automatically maintaining the proper distances between type and first stroke and between the stroke and the outside of the frame. Currently it has to be two objects and if the type needs more that one line, the height of the background frame has to be adjusted manually.
In Illustrator you use the Appearance panel to keep adding strokes and change characteristics. In this design it's super easy to align the first stroke to the inside and the second stroke to the outside.
Another solution is to add a characteristic to stroke alignment: align to inside with an offset or in this case you'd call it an inset.
Tina DeJarld
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Tina DeJarld
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I've tried using paragraph borders to accomplish the same look and functionality, and it's almost there but requires manually adjusting the offsets for different size objects, such as a two-line vs. three-line object. But it brings to mind that maybe more control options in paragraph borders would do it. For example, could the border be anchored to the size of the text frame rather than the paragraph?