Lesson E: Power Styling

• Go to page 7 in the downloaded document called 3 Text Styles.indd. It’s time to both test and fine-tune the styles we’ve been making.
• With the Selection tool, select the text frame on page 7. Go to either the Properties panel or the Paragraph Styles panel and choose the body copy paragraph style. If you use the Properties panel, you may have to first click the Paragraph Styles button near the top so that the list of styles contains the right type.
• In my case, the 11-point Myriad Pro is too big and the text becomes overset. With the entire frame selected, I’d suggest making the text only 9 points, so we have room for a few headers, too.
• After resizing the text, our body copy style will show an override. Go to the Paragraph Styles panel menu and choose Redefine Style, or in the Properties panel, click the icon to the right of the style’s name (). This redefines body copy to be the size we chose. You should notice that change on page 6 as well.
• Double-click in the text frame to enable the Type tool cursor. There are three paragraphs to which we should apply our topic header style:

“A header”

“Pale blue dot”

“Distant epochs”

• Insert the cursor in each of those paragraphs and choose topic header from the Paragraph Styles menu in the Properties panel, or click on that style’s name in the Paragraph Styles panel.
• Insert the cursor in two or three body copy paragraphs and apply the subtopic style so that when we change that style’s definition later, we’ll see that change in the text.

For the next few topics, we’ll need the Paragraph Styles panel. If it’s not on-screen, either open the Properties panel’s list of paragraph styles and choose Manage Styles, or go to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles.

Keep Options

Note where your cursor is. Is it blinking in a paragraph? Or perhaps you have pressed the esc key and thus the entire frame is selected. Or maybe there’s nothing selected at all right now. In any of these cases, it’s likely unwise to highlight a paragraph style in the Paragraph Styles panel unless you’re trying to apply that style to something or set it as a default. However, you may right-click on a style’s name (without first left-clicking) without it being applied.

• Right-click on the style called topic header and choose Edit “topic header”… from the menu that pops up.
• In the Paragraph Style Options dialog now in front of you, go to the Keep Options section. Since the paragraph we’re editing is a header, we likely will want to keep All Lines In Paragraph together. Also, to prevent the even more perverse situation of a header at the bottom of a column, with the text it “heads” in the next, we’ll set it to Keep with Next: 1 (or 2) lines.
• Finally, we should set the Start Paragraph option to In Next Column. The Microsoft Word document we’ll be placing soon will have a structure like the one we are seeing here: several topics with some explanatory text about each.

GREP Styles: Find and Style

If you look carefully in the text we just styled, you’ll see the word “InDesign” a few times. We are going to get that word to be formatted with our spicy character style automatically. To do so, we’ll edit our body copy paragraph style to use the GREP Style feature.

Please read “GREP Style” (page 256) and embrace your inner geek for a few minutes. You can also read about grep searches in the “Find/Change” chapter of the Compendium.

• Right-click on the style called body copy and choose Edit “body copy”… from the menu that pops up.
• In the Paragraph Style Options dialog, be sure that the Preview checkbox is checked in the lower-left corner, and then go to the GREP Style section.
• Click the New GREP Style button.
• Click on the bit of text that says “d+.” In the field that holds that text, replace what’s there with “InDesign” (spelled correctly, including case).
• Then click where it says “[None].” You’ll find that’s a menu from which you should choose spicy. Then click elsewhere in the dialog box.

Anywhere the word “InDesign” appears, it should now be hot pink. This feature is handy when you know that there will be text (like a product or company name) that must appear in a particular font and/or color. You would build a character style for that formatting, and then create a GREP style in the paragraph styles used where the word or phrase will appear.

Nested Styles: Style Text via Sequences

It’s finally time to fine-tune the formatting of the subtopic paragraph style!

• Right-click on the style called subtopic and choose Edit “subtopic”… from the menu that pops up.
• In the Paragraph Style Options dialog, be sure that the Preview checkbox is checked in the lower-left corner, then go to the Drop Caps and Nested Styles section.
• Click the New Nested Style button.

• In the first menu, choose the character style my bold that we made earlier.
• Then, to specify how far it should be applied, go to the last item (which initially says “Words”). This, too, is a menu. Choose “Sentences” from the list. To see the result, click elsewhere in the dialog box. The first sentence of each paragraph to which you applied the subtopic style is now bold.

  You should read more about “Nested Styles” (page 255). Both these and GREP Styles are powerful ways to apply formatting.