Set the distance between text frames

[guardsquare]

If I use distribute spacing to set a distance between two text frames, or a text frame and a figure, it sets the distance using the text bounding box. However, I want to set the distance using the text characters. I achieve this by outlining the text, but everywhere I read people are advising not to use outlining at all. Is there another way to do this?

P.S.: Same goes for Illustrator

[Haeme Ulrich]

afaik this isn't possible. You have to change the height of the text frame to the height of the text. In InDesign you could do this with a double click to the anchor point:

[guardsquare]

Hi Haeme! I know about that one, but it doesn't fully fit the text.

[winterm]

You could use Baseline Grid. Here I set Increment Every: 100 pt in Preferences:

[guardsquare]

Winterm, how do I fit the text to the grid lines? Is it something I have to do manually and by estimation?

[winterm · Accepted solution]

Baseline Grid is set via Document Preferences (Edit > Preferences > Grids). So it will be Document-wide setting. You should consider your own value here for Baseline Grid increment. It's 100 pt in my sample.

After that you should turn on Align to Grid option for your text. It's a preferable approach to set it as a Paragraph Style option (Paragraph Style Options > Indents and Spacing > Align to Grid: [I guess you should set here First Line Only]).

Assuming you already have set a special Para style for the text you want to align...

[guardsquare]

Thanks, it's a good workaround!

[DBLjan]

I could image to script that:

Select both textframes. Throw a dialog to let you choose the distance between (or a set value). Then, duplicate both frames, call Text2Path, and do the boundary-math. Delete both duplicates. Shift lower textbox up with calculated value.

[guardsquare]

DBLjan, I didn't quite catch that. I'm a dummie Can you explain this in more detail?