InDesign Text and Table Formatting (BUR-INDFX200)

This workshop teaches the kind of InDesign text and table effects that go beyond standard formatting — the techniques that make a document, a heading, or a data table look intentionally designed rather than default. Participants will learn how to build creative character and paragraph effects, distinctive heading and rule treatments, and custom table designs, along with the document-level automation that makes these techniques fast and repeatable rather than one-off manual work.

This course assumes intermediate InDesign skill — comfort with paragraph and character styles, basic table creation, and general layout work. It is not an introduction to styles or tables; it's focused on pushing past their default behavior into creative and production-efficient territory. It's well suited to designers and production artists who already know InDesign's basics and want a toolkit of effects and automation techniques they can pull from on real projects, rather than reinventing a similar effect from scratch every time.

The course scales from a 3-hour overview session, which surveys one or two signature techniques from each category, to a full day that adds extended hands-on build time and table and document automation in depth.

Full outline below reflects the 1-day version. The 3-hour version covers Modules 1–3 and 6 at a survey pace — one or two techniques per category rather than the full set — with Modules 4 and 5 reduced to a single representative technique each.

1. Character Recipes
   1. Character-level highlighting and custom highlighter colors
   2. Hyperlink character styling: automatic styles, better and anti-collision underlining, differentiating hyperlink types
   3. Hyperlinks to email, phone, and text message destinations
   4. Overscoring, true redaction, and faux redaction variations (strikethrough and underline-based)
2. Paragraph Recipes
   1. Reversed and negative titles, with and without shading
   2. Paragraph redacting and paragraph highlighting, including the dyslexic-friendly, readability-enhancing approach
   3. Cast shadow effects: basic, forward, dynamic, and multiple shadows
   4. Vertical side heads (with and without tables, plus threaded side heads)
   5. Automated heading lists, numbering, and symbol or image markers before headings
3. Heading Rules
   1. Rule treatments: simple, short, multiple, and multi-colored rules
   2. Boxed, angled-box, and scalloped-box paragraphs; rules on two sides and up to headings
   3. File tab headings (plain, filled, filled & outlined) and filled box with floating title
   4. The Sci-Fi Code Display effect
   5. Outdent and hanging headings, hanging drop caps, and layered drop caps with nested styles
   6. Alternating paragraph and line formatting
4. GREP Recipes
   1. Auto-formatting figure and table references, brand names, and called-out terms
   2. Case-insensitive GREP styles and automatic small caps for acronyms
   3. Automatic highlighting or redaction and OpenType fraction formatting via GREP
   4. Cleanup GREP: diacritics styling, runt removal, smart quotes, emails, URLs, dates, and times
5. Tab Recipes
   1. Tab-free equal-width spacing and two-click tab stop creation
   2. Striped tab-separated lists and decimal alignment, even when decimals are missing
   3. Dot leader variations: loose, tighter, smaller and non-round dots, dash leaders
   4. Colored, faded, and gradient (including double-up) leaders
   5. Underscore tabs, and why perfect right-aligned tabs sometimes mean not using tabs at all
6. Table Recipes
   1. One-click table formatting and first-page header row variations
   2. Alternating row fills and row, column, or cell stroking
   3. Row headers, total columns, and elegant monochrome tables
   4. Transparency in table row fills and gradient-filled tables
   5. Rounded corner tables and cells; tabbed comparison tables
   6. Non-rectangular, round, and triangular table cells
7. Document Recipes
   1. Modifying InDesign defaults and making custom character styles available in every new document
   2. Import/export settings, resetting preferences, and finding and counting overset text
   3. Batch "don't hyphenate" lists across InDesign, Word, and Excel
   4. Text variables and conditional text, by language or by price
   5. Filling type with imagery or type, filling type counters, and blurring text
   6. Two-click formatting of an entire document

Each student receives a comprehensive set of materials, including course notes and all class examples.