Indesign: how to style a paragraph so that it will occupy no vertical space in the document flow (similar to "float" in css)

I am laying out a book that has line numbers on every fifth line. I want it to look like this:

line #    text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text
          text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text 
line #    text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text 

          ...

In my opinion the line number does not belong to the same line with the poem. So it is a paragraph. Then what I have is this:

line #
text line text line text line text line text 
text line text line text line text line text
text line text line text line text line text 
text line text line text line text line text
text line text line text line text line text 
line #

text line text line text line text line text 
text line text line text line text line text
...

What I did is:

• I gave some left indent to all the text


• I gave some space before to the paragraph style of text lines


• I gave no space before, no left indent and a negative baseline shift to the line numbers

so i ended up with this:

line #    text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text
          text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text 

line #    text line text line text line text line text 
          text line text line text line text line text 
          ...

Although this seems to work, there remains a space between every fifth line. and I feel there should be a better / more elegant way to do this.

Any ideas?

Answer

You've hit the reverse situation to the one I ran into when I added web desgin to my arsenal a few years ago. CSS and InDesign layout aren't the same thing, and need different thought processes. Semantic considerations, as in HTML, don't really apply here, but I suspect that's how you got the idea to make line numbers their own paragraphs.

Your line numbers need to change from a Paragraph Style to Nested Styles (Character Styles), without any baseline shift, and you need to use first line indents as Lauren suggests.

• 
  

  Replace the paragraph mark at the end of your first line number with a Tab. It'll look ugly, but ignore that for now. Clear overrides so it's all just your standard paragraph style (Alt/Option-click on the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel).

  
  



• 
  

  Edit the paragraph style so it uses nested character styles for your line numbers, ending at the first tab. (I used only one style, but you may have one for the word and another for the number. In that case, the first style applies to 1 Word, and the second applies through the Tab.) Set the tab stop the same as your left indent.

  
  

• From your description, it looks like the text is set in paragraphs of five lines each, with either natural or forced line breaks and a hard return on line five, so you would set your indents something like this:

• Now run a grep find/change to replace all hard returns in your line number paragraphs with tab characters:

• 
  

  Select all the applicable text (Ctl/Cmd-A will select all text in an entirely story).

  
  


• 
  

  In the Paragraph Styles panel, Alt/Option-click the modified paragraph style to apply it throughout and remove any leftover overrides.