Adobe has released the 2015 version of Creative Cloud. And that, of course, brings new versions of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. Lots of blogs are covering the headline features, but I often find that the small improvements often impact my workflow the most. I’m still exploring the applications, but figured I'd start posting new features as I discover them.

The first one in InDesign that jumped out at me is paragraph shading. You can now apply shading to any paragraph… so no more drawing a color block behind a block of text you want to highlight.

The blue box is created using paragraph shading. Here, I've ALSO inset the paragraph margins.

A couple of obvious advantages to this:

If you want to shade a paragraph within a long block of text, it will move and resize automatically as you make changes.
It can be completely controlled and modified through style sheets, making it infinitely more powerful.

You can apply basic paragraph shading from the Control Palette or Paragraph Palette, but to gain full control, select “Paragraph Shading…” from the flyout menu on the Paragraph palette. The dialog box provides options to use a tint, set an offset and control how the shading is applied.

The full paragraph shading dialog box offers more options.

There is also an option for “Do not Print or Export*,” which is pretty cool if you want to highlight a passage that needs to be updated, but don’t want it to print. (I often set text that needs to be updated in 100% magenta. Now I have the option to shade it…)

* Not sure about the capitalization here, Adobe...