Paragraph Rules Run Too Short Under Text

Question

I've noticed that when I select a paragraph rule to run under some text (instead of the whole column) that it runs a little too short if the text has been tracked. If there's no kerning or tracking, the rule runs the width of the text just fine. But soon as the text is stretched out the rule doesn't quite extend the entire way under the text. Is there a way to fix this? I have InDesign CS5 for Windows (ver. 7.0.4).
Ed Hedemann

Answer 1

@ Lilia,
Forced line breaks are special characters, too.
But here's the good news. I tested your theory this morning about not applying the tracking to the last character and it DOES work for all alignment options, and it does not move the last character's position, so it is viable, in fact excellent, when applied using the GREP style. So for headings (or any other tracked paragarph that needs a Rule Below set to text width and where the text is tracked with a positive value) you want to create a 0 tracking character style and apply it to the last character inthe paragraph using .$
The tracking value should be added to the basic character format of the paragraph style:
The character style should do nothing but assign a tracking value of 0:
And that character style should be applied as a GREP Style like this:
No special characters and comletely automatic, and the text can be edited at will, or the formatting in the style can be changed and it will continue to work.
Well done.
By the way, welcome to the forum. If you want to learn about GREP, and you should, both as a teacher and an obviously talented user, I highly recommend Peter Kahrel's primer from O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596156015.do which is a real bargain at $9.99 and available as PDF, Mobi or ePub. GREP is incredibly powerful, and actually not terribly difficult to learn (and the Find/Change dialog in ID has most of the commonly used metacharacters in the dropdowns if you have trouble memorizing). There are many users here who will be glad to help you learn GREP, including Peter K, if you run into a stumbling block and post a question.
I'm also going to update my bug report from last night to include your workaround. It might point the engineers toward an easy way to fix the code so none of this will be necessary someday.