[John Mensinger]

The Transform Each command does what you want.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

To get a coherent answer, you’ll probably have to provide greater detail about your PDF export method. What you’re seeing isn’t a common problem, so something somewhere isn’t right. It will take some troubleshooting to find it. Can you post the offending PDF?

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

I believe you’ll have to add that one in Acrobat.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

I’m reasonably certain that the initial text input=layer name is the extent of the automated feature. After that, layer renaming is manual only.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

It won’t be easy:

“…a combination of pentagon and hexagon faces. This shape is called a buckyball after Richard Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome.”

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

Well, in InDesign, you would get that formatting by adding space-before or space-after paragraph, preferably applied via a Paragraph Style with the requisite values entered in the Indents and Spacing panel.

Thing is, there’s no guarantee that it will transfer through the CMS that way. If the CMS generates simple HTML pages, adding the extra return, (as you did in your posted example above), would probably do the trick. If the CMS generates pages subject to CSS rules, you may have to get someone at the host end to alter the template.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

Before filling, create a new layer. That will put your path fill on the new layer so it will indeed be available for individual manipulation. To feather the fill, apply a Gaussian Blur.

And/or…instead of working directly with the path, you can convert it to a selection. Once it is an active selection, choose Select > Feather, then fill.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

You could make the background the same color as that of the web page, which would effectively render it invisible.

To be rid of the white background, you’ll have to save to a format that supports transparency. JPEG doesn’t. You need GIF or PNG.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

Also, when resampling to smaller sizes, choose the method “Bicubic Sharper” at the bottom of the Image Size dialog box.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.

[John Mensinger]

Changing text alignment, (horizontal or vertical), in a large number of pre-existing text frames all at once can be done with a script, but I’m no script writer, so I can’t help you with that directly. A visit to Adobe’s InDesign Scripting User Forum could help:

https://forums.adobe.com/community/indesign/indesign_scripting

In the absence of a script, Object Styles could help. Create an object style based on a frame you already changed, and assign a keyboard shortcut. You’ll still have to trudge through selecting and applying, but an Object Style will minimize the steps.

John M:
All of the vim with none of that annoying vigor.