Blue selection not aligning with decoration border

[Nathan Shirley]

The left, right, and bottom of the blue selection line all align with a decoration border I've made for a paragraph style, but the top doesn't align (and therefore doesn't snap properly).

Could this be a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

[Joachim_L]

You are not specifically doing something wrong IMO, but you can do it different. I strongly believe, that decorations were never meant for your purpose. Your example seems to be a single line of text. There are text frame options where you can achieve the same effect. Decorations are meant for "decorating" paragraphs, but keep in mind, that a text frame can have more than one paragraph, which is possibly not decorated. So where do you want to align this or other paragraphs?

So now we come to the bug part with decorations:

1. Cap, Join, Align do nothing in the stroke part. I think because of what I said above.

2. Arrow start is at the bottom of the paragraph and arrow end is at the top of the paragraph. Should it not be the other way round?

3. When the stroke has already arrows and you change the width of the stroke, the arrows are lost.

4. Arrow at the end of the line is not working or gives strange results. Arrows are always inside the stroke, even when they should be at the end.

[Nathan Shirley]

I used this single line example just so the selection box would be visible in a screen capture, in most cases I have more than one line of text in a box.

I started by making a text frame with a stroke, as you mentioned, but I realized the text frame doesn't take effect as a paragraph style (for easily applying the same border over and over). Maybe I'm overlooking a way to apply a text frame border to a paragraph style?

This possible bug I noted isn't a huge issue, but if the top of the selection box matched the other sides, then snapping would be uniform top-bottom-left-right.

[A_B_C]

Hi Nathan,

maybe I don’t precisely understand what you are trying to achieve, but I am not sure how you would imagine that to work. As the topmost border of the decoration is relative to he cap height of the used font, different fonts will always give you different results. You can only try to manually dial in the value, depending on your font.

Text frame properties cannot be addressed by text styles. They reside on a different structural level within the document.

Alex 

[Nathan Shirley]

Basically I'm struggling to get the selection box to align with the decoration box I've created. I made an outlined text box using decorations rather than a text frame stroke so that it would be included in a saved paragraph style. I can't quite wrap my head around the relationship of the position of the selection box and of decorations. I'm guessing there is none, but it would be nice if you could set it to follow decorations rather than the text itself.

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Nathan Shirley said:

but it would be nice if you could set it to follow decorations rather than the text itself.

I'm not sure how that could work, given that a single Text Frame can contain multiple paragraphs, with potentially different decorations setup.

Have you noticed that you can create a Style (not a Text Style) from a Text Frame? It will carry information about the stroke/fill of the frame, as well as characteristics for the text within the frame, including the paragraph style of that text. Perhaps that would enable you to make use of the Text Frame attributes to draw your border, rather than working with decorations as you are now?

[Nathan Shirley]

Thanks! I figured there must be a better way to do this. Where would I find this? I've found the paragraph styles, character styles, and text styles...

[walt.farrell]

55 minutes ago, Nathan Shirley said:

Thanks! I figured there must be a better way to do this. Where would I find this? I've found the paragraph styles, character styles, and text styles...

View > Studio > Styles

[Dave Harris]

On 6/29/2019 at 7:24 AM, Nathan Shirley said:

Basically I'm struggling to get the selection box to align with the decoration box I've created. I made an outlined text box using decorations rather than a text frame stroke so that it would be included in a saved paragraph style. I can't quite wrap my head around the relationship of the position of the selection box and of decorations. I'm guessing there is none, but it would be nice if you could set it to follow decorations rather than the text itself.

The selection box is actually set to the larger of the cap height and the height of a lower case letter ell. Your example doesn't align because you are using a font with a tall ell.

That explains what is happening. It's behaving as designed, although in this case the design isn't great.

[A_B_C]

Maybe it would indeed make sense to reconsider this implementation, Dave. 

Suppose someone would like to create chapter headings in the context of a single- or multi-column text frame, not snapping to the baseline grid, with a vertically off-set decoration line running across the column. Then they wouldn’t have a chance to snap the decoration line to the baseline grid.

[A_B_C]