Apr. 1, 2009
Using Paragraph Styles in InDesign can make formatting text easy!
If you’re using InDesign and not using styles, you’re living in the stone age… Let me show you how to save all the formatting attributes applied to a paragraph for later use, and then apply them to similar text in a one click action.
Before we get into that let me list the different types of formatting captured in a paragraph style. We can capture the following: Basic Character Formats, Advanced Character Formats, Indents and Spacing, Tabs, Paragraph Rules, Keep Options, Hyphenation, Justification, Drop Caps and Nested Styles, Grep Style, Bullets and Numbering, Character Colour, Open Type Features, Underline Options and Strikethrough Options.
Once you have formatted any text in a document, like a header, you don’t really want to do all the same formatting steps over again on every other header within your document. If you had a document with 20 more headers, chances are you’d be changing all sorts of formatting options for the next 10 minutes. However, if you create a paragraph style of the header text first you can go through your document, insert your type cursor within the header paragraphs, then click on the paragraph style you created and you’ll be done within a minute.
[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]
One Response to “Using Paragraph Styles”
I have been using ID CS3 for a while and have come across a chronic style sheet problem. It is random when it happens…. after assigning paragraph styles that have worked well for a while during the various stages of design/production, the text appears in all caps in a font unrelated to the document which is not what I want. But when selecting the text, the style is highlighted without showing it has changed in any way…. This is so annoying and I can not figure out why this happens and how to fix it. I end up having to recreate new styles. This is a huge waste of time. Can you help?
By Leslie on Dec 17, 2009