Keith Martin
Take the mind-numbing drudgery out of complex text styling jobs by preparing style sheets for your layouts.
Today, I’m going to talk about style sheets in print design. This may not sound particularly exciting, but it will make your work a lot easier and enable you to finish the job in hand far quicker.
If you don’t use style sheets in your desktop publishing (DTP) work, you’re wasting your time. I know this is like backing up – even if you understand the benefits, it’s usually something that hardly anyone actually gets around to doing – but this is one of those ‘stitch in time saves nine’ things. If you put in a little effort to set up and use some basic styles, you’ll find that your life gets easier as the job progresses.
Creating a style sheet isn’t only in case you need to make broad changes across pages that have already been worked on. It also speeds up the normal production process, and makes it much easier and safer for freelancers to be brought in to help finish off projects. Half a dozen ready-made styles should normally cover all requirements, and a few examples of what to use and where is all that normally needs to be given to someone fresh to a project.
Getting started
The first thing to consider when approaching a new project is what the default, base-level style should be for text. In QuarkXPress, there are Normal styles for character and paragraph work; InDesign has something called Basic Paragraph; while Illustrator calls this the Normal Paragraph Style, and includes a Normal Character Style, too.
Most people miss this trick completely, even though defining what goes on in the Normal or Basic styles can save a certain amount of work straightaway. Start by formatting the body text until it looks right, and then update or redefine the Normal/Basic style to make it take on these attributes. Text that comes in with no predefined formatting will automatically take this on, so get it right from the start.
From here, think about what custom formatting needs to be added to different portions of type. As you’ve used the Normal style to get started, set up each new style so that it only controls what needs to be different. Character Styles can apply to arbitrary selected chunks of text, while Paragraph Styles always apply to whole paragraphs at once, even if they’re just clicked in. Styles can be based on other styles and, if so, they’ll change with those if they’re edited. Watch out for the Next Paragraph feature; this only works if you’re typing fresh copy, not if you apply it to existing paragraphs. So far, this is largely obvious. However, InDesign has a particularly nifty trick up its sleeve and it doesn’t take much effort to make use of it.
String styles together
Nested Styles is an InDesign-specific paragraph style feature that enables you to string together a number of different character styles and have them apply automatically to text according to the structure of the content itself. Or, to put it more simply, you can make a style that will apply another style until, for example, a set number of words is reached, or perhaps a tab character is encountered. Then it switches to a different style automatically.
This style nesting can get quite sophisticated. Okay, there’s no provision for ‘if-then-else’ logic structures, but that would start to get more like programming. With a bit of forethought, you can prepare text so that it has just the right kind of structure, or prepare your nested styles to cope with an existing text structure if that’s simpler.
Some of my publishing students are working their way through a big magazine redesign and relaunch project, part of which involves rethinking the entire layout structure of their chosen title. More than one has expressed complete horror and disbelief at how much work goes into formatting a standard listings page. However, once a magazine redesign plan is finished, all that hard work and effort is built into clever style constructions, or at least it should be.
Take a magazine or newspaper TV listings page. The text will always follow the same basic structure, issue after issue – for example, time, title, description and rating. Make sure that the items are identifiable in some consistent way, such as always being the same number of characters or words, or separated by a tab, an em dash or non-breaking space, an explicit End Nested Style character, or whatever single character you type into the Nested Styles identifier. A bit of time spent creating some nested styles in InDesign will turn a mind-numbing afternoon’s effort into a ‘click and move on’ moment.
QuarkXPress doesn’t have this feature, but you can get even more of the work done ahead of time if you like. It’s possible to take word-processed content that’s styled already and map those styles to styles in your DTP software. The problem with this is that it relies on people doing that work properly. As this normally means content prepared in Word, and because it likes to muck around with type formatting when you drag or copy/paste text from one part of a document to another, I find it can be more miss than hit. However, if you have diligent people creating your word-processed content, give it a whirl.
When importing text, click Show Import Options (InDesign) or Use Stylesheets (XPress) to gain a certain level of control over the incoming content. Quark’s approach is to import the embedded styles directly into its Style Sheets lists, where you can then adjust them as you like. When this works, it can save you from even having to select and click your way through the text, let alone having to apply individual formatting choices.
Keep type control
Most of the time, in most applications, you’ll use styles to control your type. But it isn’t just text that can be controlled with saved settings. Objects on the page can be styled in pretty much the same way; look for Item Styles in XPress, Object Styles in InDesign, and Graphic Styles in Illustrator.
Draw out a box and set it up the way you want. Then, with it selected, use the Item > Object > Graphic Styles palette options to save a new style. XPress’ Item Styles can include width, height, position and more. This can be a real boon, but don’t forget to turn off the options you don’t want or things will start behaving oddly when you start using your new style.
Whichever application you prefer, styles can make setting up items such as boxouts or picture frames with consistent, repeated settings an absolute doddle. Perhaps in an effort to make up for the lack of an equivalent of InDesign’s Nested Styles, QuarkXPress has styles for grids as well. This takes more than a little getting used to but is worth the effort.
The usefulness of styles is often overlooked, especially when the pressure is on. It isn’t relevant to every job, but whenever you have a multiple-page product to produce or you’ll need to create new versions or editions of something, use styles. For further InDesign reading, see bit.ly/typestyling, and for a 20MB XPress PDF guide, see bit.ly/typestylingpdf. As the saying goes, work smarter, not harder.
