InDesign Forms: Three-Sided Boxes

3 min readSep 13, 2016

Creating forms is, I think, the most difficult and mundane task a graphic designer ever faces.

EVERYTHING HAS TO BE EXACT. There will always be changes and when the forms are created with a mix of text and rules and symbols, it can become a real mess. Creating forms in InDesign is no picnic. Excel works better, but, hey, that’s life. It may even work better in Scribus; I’ll try that next.

The biggest problem I faced in creating this form is that I needed to create “fill-in-the-blank” boxes for the contractor to write in the customer info. Usually, these boxes are four-sided boxes. In this case, I needed to created a three-sided box — a “topless” box.

You would think this is an easy thing to do. Nahhh. I could have created them with boxes and white lines, or a series of upper-case Is with an underscore, or some other cludge.

Going Topless

HERE’S HOW I DID IT. Maybe there are better ways, but this seemed to work for me after some trial-and-error. I was able to create the boxes as “text” in the Character Styles (pull-down TYPE>>CHARACTER STYLES) palette using the Apple Symbols Glyph (TYPE>>GLYPHS) for a four-sided box, and then simply copied and pasted the number of boxes I needed for each entry. It worked for me; it may work for you.

Below are screen shots of the steps I took to “go topless.” This is InDesign CC (2015) Mac. I believe these functions are common in all versions, though.