Apr. 14, 2009
Embed a Character Style within a Paragraph Style to get the desired look…
Nested Styles allow us to customize a paragraph style, giving us even more creative effect and control when working with text. Put simply, a Nested Style is a character style embedded within a paragraph style.
To achieve the result above, create a paragraph style of some text and call it “Body”, then open the style options dialogue for that style. There are a few ways to open the style options dialogue, you can right click (two button mouse) or control click (one button mouse) on the “Body” style, you can even double click on the style name within the paragraph styles panel which will also open the style options dialogue.
Next, click on the “Drop Caps and Nested Styles” tab. From the “Nested Styles” section you need to choose “New Nested Style”. Now you need to tell the current “Body” paragraph style what character style and rules will be applied to our “New Nested Style”.
The first thing we need to do is to select a character style from the drop down menu. If you have previously created a character style it will appear in the drop down menu. If you haven’t, new to InDesign CS4 is the ability to create a style from any location that you can choose a style. So if you need to create a style at this stage choose “New Character Style…” from the drop down menu. When the new character style dialogue appears, keep things simple and change the character colour only. From the character colour tab, change your character swatch colour to Cyan. Now rename your new character style, we’ll call it “Cyan”. When done choose “OK”. Make sure your “Cyan” character style is now selected within the nested styles section.
The next step is to establish the rule which determines how the nested style will be applied to the paragraph. There are loads of options available here, however we are going to keep things simple, choose “through 1 Words”. When done, choose “OK” and the style options dialogue will close.
You should now see all paragraphs that have the “Body” style applied now also have every first word appearing in cyan. We have now embedded a character style within a paragraph style in its most basic form. I would encourage you to explore the other options available when setting up a nested style, the video tutorial below explains the other options in more detail.
[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]
