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BetL875

: Indent away from spine in InDesign I'm working on a book design and I'm currently trying to format the blockquotes. I want them to be offset from the rest of the text to create a bit of

@BetL875

Posted in: #AdobeIndesign #PageLayout #Text

I'm working on a book design and I'm currently trying to format the blockquotes. I want them to be offset from the rest of the text to create a bit of visual interest, but I cannot seem to do it the way I want.

I want the margin towards the spine to be larger and the margin away from the spine to be smaller, but I still want the text to be aligned justified to the left. I know there's an "Align Away From Spine" option, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a way to indent relative to the spine, keeping the alignment the same for all pages.

Is there a way to do this in InDesign?

Edit 1

This is what I would like to do:



The text on top and bottom is normal body text while the paragraphs in the middle are blockquotes. As you can see, all text have the same alignment.

Edit 2

This is a sample page from the design:



(Emphasis done on margins and page edge for clarity.)

As you can see, the text is indented the same amount on both sides, allowing me to outdent things like dropcaps for chapter headings. Right now, the quote is indented by two units on each side, but I'd like to outdent it by two units on the side away from the spine instead.

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@Debbie163

That's a very interesting puzzler.

Just like Janus, I first couldn't think of any other solution than anchored text frames.
After a bit of thinking, I can come up with alternative solution, but that involves quite a lot of manipulation (could probably be scripted though) along with one important limitation: "quotes" paragraphs would keep altogether. Meaning if a long quote starts in the bottom of a page, it will jump to next one.

Here's the tweak:
The idea is to combine table along with Align Towards Spine feature.
Place the "quote" text into a single cell table (using Convert text to table is handy here, but don't catch the paragraph symbol), and apply a paragraph style to the paragraph that holds the table. Let's call it 'behindTable' and set it as Aligned Towards Spine. Add some left AND right indent (since it must work for both even and odd page)

You can create a cell style in order to get rid of inside margins, borders and to apply a paragraph style to the text.

Now, set cell width in order to match your layout. In my example 160mm (maybe someone can come up with a tip to set a fix column/cell width: would be great!) Note that table will overflow the text frame...

See example below:

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