You will find that as an InDesign user the Paragraph palette is one of the most needed tools

Here is an explanation of most of InDesign’s Paragraph Palette’s functions which should arm you with enough knowledge to do most design tasks you might need to do while laying out a design document.

The Paragraph palette ([1] enlarged version)

To find out the name of the buttons in that palette, just place your mouse cursor on the several icons within the palette and their name will appear. This time I’ll have you do the work and I’ll watch.

1. Open a document either Letter size or A4 (depending in which part of the world you are).
2. Draw a text frame which is to be 90 mm wide by 120 mm high (for those who use inches it would be about 3.5 x 4.7 inches). Now fill it with placeholder text. Ah-ha! You thought you could skip the history lesson. Yes you actually need to use placeholder text É Make sure you use Times or Times New Roman regular, size 12 pt. I am using these two fonts in these examples because they are the most common ones so you should have them.
3. Now select all the text in the box by clicking with the type tool inside the box and pressing Control + A (Windows) or Command + A (Mac OS). Now go to your Paragraph palette and click on the Align Centre button (second button on the top from the left). Observe what happens. To find out the name of any button or icon, you just need to move your mouse over that button or icon and wait a couple of seconds and its name will appear.
4. Do the same with the Align Right button and so on with the other buttons that are on the top of the palette.
5. Now with all the text selected still go to the Left Indent icon and type a number. Type 2 or something like that. You will see that the whole text will be indented. Undo that, Control + Z (Windows) or Command + Z Mac Os, and just select just part of the text. Go to the Left Indent and type a number again. Only the selected text will indent. Try this with the different types of justification and see what happens.
6. Do the same as in point 5 with the Right Indent.
7. Make sure your text is clean from any formatting and then go to the First Line Left Indent icon. Type a number there, this time 5 (if you work in inches you might want to type something like 0.2). The first line of all of your paragraphs should indent.
8. Undo what you just done, select all paragraphs and type a value in Space Before (you can use the same ones that you used in point 7). You should get spacing between paragraphs as InDesign has added 5 mm (or 0.2 inches) before each paragraph. So now you know how to space them without pressing double hard return.
9. Do the same thing that you have done in point 8, but this time use Space After. The result will be similar to what you did in point 8, but InDesign this time has added space É well, after each paragraph. You don’t need to use both Space Before and Space After usually.
10. Now only select the first paragraph and type the number 3 in Drop Cap Number of Lines. You should get a drop capital that is as high as the first 3 lines of your paragraph. To adjust your drop caps per Jacci’s articles, use the kerning, tracking and or any other character controls as needed.
11. Put your text cursor next to your drop cap. You will notice in your Praragraph palette the Drop Cap One or More Characters went from 0 to 1 when you added your drop cap. Now change that to 5, for example. You will see that the first 5 characters will all become drop caps. Note that if you have a space between characters, that will also be counted, so intead of having 5 drop caps, it will look like you only have 4.
12. Make sure that everything in your Paragraph palette is set back to 0. Now uncheck the Hyphenate option. You will see that your text won’t be hyphenated.

Paragraph Rules

You can access the Paragraph Rules window from the Paragraph palette menu ([2] enlarged version)

Paragraph rules are lines that go along your text either above it or below it. They are applied to the first line of each paragraph by InDesign.

For the purpose of me explanation I will have you apply the Paragraph Rule to an existing line of text. So select a line from your placeholder text. Now go to the Paragraph palette and go to Paragraph Rules. (I will leave the rest of the options for now). Open the Paragraph Rules window, click on Rule On next to the where it says Rule Above. Check Preview so you can see what is happening while you apply your formatting. You should see some lines above your lines of text. You can apply rules also below the text, by clicking on the arrows just next to Rule Above and choosing Rule Below when the drop down menu appears.

There are the easier options like Colour and Weight, which let you decide the colour and the thickness of your rules. You then have the Type option which allows you to choose which type of yule you want to use. Let’s choose triple. You will see that the Gap Colour, which was previously grayed out, is now active. That means that you are not only allowed to change the colour of your rule, which in this case is formed of 3 lines, but you can also change the colour between the gaps of the lines that compose the rule. Try it out so you have a visual idea of what I mean.

In Width you can choose whether you rules will be as wide as your columns or as wide as the text lines.

You can indent a rule on the left side or on the right side.

Offset allows you to change the distance of the rule from the baseline of your type. So if you rule above or rule below your text, if your offset value is 0, then the rule will be positioned on the text’s baseline and you won’t notice any difference. Now try to type a number into the offset field, something like 5 mm or 0.2 inches, and you will see that if you have chosen Rule Above, your rule will move upwards, while if you have chosen Rule Below, your rule will move downwards.