Features

To create and apply nested styles, import styles from other InDesign documents and import styled text from Word.

Anyone working with InDesign quickly comes to appreciate the value of styles. Paragraph styles allow you to apply a multitude of consistent formatting attributes at a stroke, while character styles enable you to apply styles to blocks of text within a paragraph, speeding up the creation of drop caps and other styled text at the sub-paragraph level.

Even so, for publications such as catalogues and directories, with rigidly repeated type formatting ad infinitum, manual application of character styles can be a time-consuming chore.

Thankfully, InDesign CS provides an answer in the form of nested styles. Nested styles apply character-level formatting for blocks of text within a paragraph. The beauty of nested styles is that you can apply them in sequence, one taking over where another finishes, end points being set by special characters or markers.

You can tell InDesign to apply a nested style to the first word, or sentence, or three letters of a paragraph, or until the @ character, an inline graphic or an invisible 'End of nested style' character - at which point another nested style takes over.

In the first part of this masterclass, you will learn how to setup and apply nested styles the easy way, and how to avoid common problems when placing formatted text from Word and other applications.

In production environments where copy is generated in

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Word, the power of styles can be further leveraged if you apply them before copy even enters InDesign. By creating style equivalents in both applications, you can import and automatically style text without lifting a finger. Our second workthrough demonstrates how to do this, and also shows you how to copy styles between InDesign documents.

Style tips

Cutting and pasting. When you paste text from Word or any other application, you can either strip it or keep its existing formatting. Strip it if you want to reformat it using InDesign styles; keep it if you want to use the existing formatting and overwrite it with equivalently named InDesign styles. Choose InDesign>Preferences>General and check or uncheck the 'Preserve text attributes when pasting' box.

Quick styles. The simplest way to create paragraph or character style sheets is to format the text the way you want it and, with the cursor positioned within the text, select New Character Style from the Character Styles palette's flyout menu or New Paragraph Style from the Paragraph Styles palette's flyout menu.

Nested styles. To create a paragraph style with nested character styles, first, format text and define character styles. Next, apply character styles to a new paragraph as nested styles (choose the Paragraph palette, and then select Drop Caps and Nested Styles from the flyout menu). Select the entire new paragraph and choose New Paragraph Style from the Paragraph Styles palette's flyout menu.

Changing styles. When you change the attributes of text to which a style has been applied, a '+' symbol appears next to the style in the relevant palette. InDesign CS enables you to easily update style definitions from text that has had a style applied and then been locally updated. Select the text and choose Redefine The Style from the Character or Paragraph Styles palette flyout menus.

Removing styles. You can force-apply a style to remove local formatting by selecting the text and alt-clicking the style in the Character or Paragraph Styles palettes.