So I thought I’d do a little quick look at InDesign as I found this little trick quite useful. InDesign’s underline has a lot more depth than a simple button so I’m going to go into the options InDesign has built into it, you can even achieve a dynamically updating box behind the type.

So just clicking underline normally does a pretty standard underline, however if you Alt + Click then you bring up a whole new dialog box which has plenty more options to it.

Obviously to make things easy (and for it to work) you should check Underline on and Preview so you can see what you’re doing in real time. The options are pretty basic and are as follows:

Weight: Thickness of the line in point size.
Offset: The gap between line and the bottom of the text.
Type: A variety of presets are available such as dotted and dashed.
Colour: The colour of the line, by default it’s text colour but it can be changed in which case the Tint becomes available, this is simply the strength of the colour, but this isn’t the same as the opacity.
Gap Colour: This never seems available but I guess it’s pretty explanatory.

To achieve a dynamic black box behind the text you simply need to change the text colour to white, the colour to black (for example), set a really heavy weight and a negative offset to bring the underline closer to the text, like so, the text in this example is 72pt Helvetica.

You can of course change the colour of the underline to imitate a yellow highlighter look like below useful if you need to highlight some notes that were given to you on the computer.

Update

Just a quick update, I forgot to say you can use Character Styles to make this a one click job. With the text selected go to the Character Styles palette (Window > Type & Tables > Character Styles or Shift + F11) click the New icon and it’s saved it, you can rename it by right clicking and selecting Edit “Character Style 1″. When creating a character style it saves every property related to the text including the font, point size, kerning etc.

Well that was nice and quick.