Improvements to "space between" feature
Hello, InDesign people!
The new "space between paragraphs using the same style" feature is a wonderful thing, and it is useful, but I feel it could be improved upon. In practice, there may be several different paragraph styles that should be regarded as the "same style" for this purpose. For instance, say I am designing a book with poetry extracts (block quotes) mixed into the main text. Before we had the "space between" feature, I had to make a paragraph style for the first line of a poem (with space before), a second style for the subsequent lines (no paragraph spacing), and a third style for the last line (space after). With the new "space between" feature, one style can accomplish all of this by specifying zero space between lines of the same style. However, in practice, a poem is likely to involve several different styles for differing indents, etc, and so in this case "space between" is not useful in practice. At the very least, a way to say "treat all of these specific styles as the 'same' for the purpose of spacing" would be an improvement.
There are many similar circumstances in which it would be helpful to specify paragraph spacing conditionally depending on what styles precede or follow the given style in context. For instance, I can imagine an extensive implementation that would allow for things like adjusting the spacing around subheads depending on what level of subhead precedes them, etc.
Thanks.
This may overlap with the suggestions in the link below:
Josh Langman
shared this idea
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Sam Craig commented
I've been trying to clean up my style lists and this is the one thing keeping me from making it better. It's great that I only need one paragraph style now, except that paragraphs can be flush or indented so I still need to keep a style for special cases of a single flush paragraph. Like you said for block quotes, I still need three different styles. Bullet/number lists with sub lists need several styles as well. This feature is nice but It really doesn't reduce the amount of styles I'm using by as much as it should. And the last thing that is annoying, If I want to override this feature for a special case I can't, I need to make another style. You were meant to bring balance to the paragraph styles list, not leave it in darkness!
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Virgil Ierubino
commented
This is an excellent suggestion. Currently my styles list is full of copies like "Body text (after list)" etc. I need to be able to say: "Spacing between [Bullet 1] and [bullet 1 new line] = 1mm".