Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

When you choose Show Options from the Paragraph pane's palette menu, four additional fields are displayed, as shown earlier in Figure 18-1. They're also always in the Control palette. Two of these fields let you insert space before and/or after paragraphs.

When you need to format a lengthy chunk of text with multiple paragraphs, there are two ways to indicate a new paragraph: You can

• Indent the paragraph's first line (by specifying a First-Line Indent value).

• Insert some extra space between the new paragraph and the preceding one.

  Note ‚

  There's no rule that says you can't use both spacing methods , but generally you'll use one or the other. What you don't want to do is insert extra returns between a paragraph, which is what was done in the days of typewriters.

To insert space before selected paragraphs, enter a value in the Space Before field in the Paragraph pane. You can also use the up and down cursor keys; each click increases the value by 1 point, while holding down Shift increases the increment to 1 pica.

The Space After field works the same as the Space Before field but inserts space below selected paragraphs. Generally, you'll use Space Before or Space After to separate paragraphs. Combining both can be confusing.