How to hide half of a character in InDesign?

Question

Let's say I have a movie with rating 2.5 and I should write this rating with specific star character which is ✪ (272A, http://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/2700-27BF). Is there some way I could use character style (or paragraph style) to hide half of the character to have a half star. It's not possible to create object of this character and make the half star, it needs to be a character.

I've tried hiding half of the character with borders, underlines and rules without any luck. Background of the page is white and hiding a character with white color doesn't seem to work. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Which half has to be hidden?

Here the explanation for all of them with character styles on a 36pt character:

Bottom and top half:

From the Character Window Options > Apply Strikethrough to the character and create a Character Style.

The measurements depend on the character size. The color cyan is just to show the bottom half to be hidden, change this color for the paper color.

For the top half change the offset distance.

Right and left half:

From the Character Window Options > Apply Strikethrough to the character and create a Character Style.

The measurements depend on the character size. The color cyan is just to show the left half to be hidden, change this color for the paper color.

On this case the strike cover the character but has a little trick on the Stroke Type:

The Strikethrough is with a dashed line, but you must create a custom dashed line from the window Stroke > Stroke Styles > New

With those options:

Change the strikethrough color to the paper color:

To hide the other half, just create a new stroke style covering the other half:

Answer 2

You could make your own font.

Since it's just symbols, I think I'd use IcoMoon to import stars I've created in Illustrator and saved as SVG.

_{^{This doesn't really, require a walkthrough, but I figured I'd outline the steps because it might not be obvious how you can map the keys and where you get to name the font, which will be "icomoon" by default.}}

1. I made 2 stars in Illustrator and exported them as .svg.
2. Imported them to IconMoon.
   • Make sure to outline strokes before importing.
3. Selected them and clicked Generate Font button at the bottom of the window.
4. There I mapped "full star" to a and "Half star" to b.
   • You could also map "full star" as a and "Half star" as capital A.
5. Finally I named the font in the output settings → Gear icon next to the Download button at the bottom of the window.
   • If you don't do that, the font name will be Icomoon once installed.
6. Then I just downloaded and unpacked the zip and put the .ttf file in my fonts folder.

And here's the font in use: