Paragraph Styles

Paragraph styles are the cornerstones of our layouts. Professional layout is often identified by its consistency, which is exactly what styles offer us. Nonetheless, I get pushback about taking the “time and trouble” to make styles. I sometimes hear statements like, “we don’t have a lot of text, just captions under photos” or “it’s a pretty simple doc, just headers and body copy.” So I’ll ask how many captions or headers there are or, more pointedly, what happens when a change of font or size is requested. When I say that such a change shouldn’t take more than maybe 10 seconds, no matter how large the document is, I usually get the listeners’ attention.

Creating a Paragraph Style

InDesign makes it easy to create styles and offers several methods for doing so. The process often involves first selecting some text that exhibits the attributes we’d like to capture with a style. That is, most of us will create styles “by example.” To do so:

1. Create a text frame with some placeholder text (either your own jottings or using the Type > Fill with Placeholder Text). I try to have representative paragraphs like a header, subhead, or body copy. Highlight and format a paragraph as you’d like it recorded, choosing the font, size, alignment, etc., from the Control panel or the Character and Paragraph panels.
2. With the cursor still in that paragraph, use one of these methods to create the style:
   • Go to the Paragraph Styles menu in the Control panel and choose New Paragraph Style….
   • Click the Create Style button in the Properties panel and then type a name.
   • Open the Paragraph Styles panel menu in the Control panel and choose New Paragraph Style….
   • While holding down option/Alt, click on the New Style button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel.
3. Most of these methods will open the large New Paragraph Style dialog box with a generic name highlighted. Take advantage of the moment to give the style an intuitive name (caption, heading, subhead, etc.).
4. Check the important checkboxes: Apply Style to Selection and Preview. You may wish to opt out of (uncheck) the option to store this style in your Creative Cloud Library unless you know you’ll want to access this style from another computer. Thanks to a kind and empathetic product manager, InDesign will leave those boxes checked from now on.

While in this dialog box, you may also wish to make adjustments to the style’s definition via the categories on the left. I describe them over the next few pages, but know that Basic Character Formats and Indents and Spacing are the most important, or are, at least, unavoidable.

Clicking OK or pressing Enter will commit your style.

Applying a Paragraph Style

Apply the style to any paragraph by positioning your text cursor within it, and then clicking on the name of the style in the Paragraph Styles panel. If you’ve highlighted text that is within several paragraphs, each of those paragraphs, in their entirety, will be formatted with the style when its name is clicked. If a standalone (not threaded) text frame is selected and a style name clicked, all the paragraphs in it will change (even in overset text). This is handy for items like captions and sidebars.

What if nothing is selected when you choose a paragraph style? Then you’ve set that style as a default and it will be used to format the text you create until you choose another default. It will also be the formatting that placed text files will inherit, depending on settings chosen when placing them.

Editing a Paragraph Style

To edit the style later I strongly recommend right-clicking its name and choosing Edit “stylename”. And that’s a right-click with no left-click first! Why? Because we apply styles by left-clicking their names and your cursor may not be where you want that style applied.

Or worse, you may unintentionally set that style as a default if you have nothing selected. This happens somewhat regularly since nothing on the page will change if a style is chosen with no text highlighted. Only later when new text is made is the default setting discovered. Then we’d have to deselect, choose a wiser default, and choose a different style for the text we made.

General Options

When you right-click on a paragraph style and choose Edit “stylename”, the Paragraph Style Options dialog box opens. Along the left side of the dialog box is a long list of options. You may be tempted to breeze past the first, General, but there are a few things of note here.

Based On

If there is a style already applied to the selected text when you create a new style, the new style is based on the style that had been there, and any changes you make to the text are added to it. For example, if you have a body copy style applied to a short paragraph and you decide to make a header style, you may start by highlighting that short paragraph, making the text larger, and choosing a bold font. If you create a new paragraph style at that point, InDesign will note (and display in the Style Settings window) that the formatting is your body copy formatting plus the different size and weight. Also, if you change any attribute in the body copy’s definition that the two styles share, that attribute will change in both styles!

For example, if both styles use the Minion Pro font family, but differ only in size and weight, changing the leading in the “based on” style will change the leading in the new style, too. This is a great time saver for styles that are that similar, but it can cause headaches if you forget that styles have this relationship. If you wish to have no “based on” relationship, choose No Paragraph Style from the Based On menu.

Next Style

Choosing a Next Style would be especially useful for paragraphs like a header that should always be followed by a subhead, for example. If you’ve already created that subhead’s style, you can choose it from the Next Style menu. If you haven’t, the last item in that menu is New Paragraph Style…, so you can build that “next style” on the fly.

If you’re editing in InDesign and finish a paragraph that has a next style, hitting return/Enter will not only begin a new paragraph, but will change the formatting automatically, too. We can use this to apply a sequence of styles to multiple paragraphs at once (provided each has a designated next style). Select those paragraphs then right-click on the style that should be first in the sequence and choose Apply “stylename” then Next Style. Each style in the sequence will be formatted! In the following figure a header, subhead, byline, and body copy are all styled in one go.

Basic Character Formats

These include the most obvious and necessary attributes of your type: font family and style, size, etc. As discussed previously, these options may be set in the Control panel or the Character panel, but for a kind of paragraph that recurs, these settings are best set in a paragraph style. Some potentially less obvious options are discussed below. For more about the characteristics they’re controlling (leading, kerning, tracking), review the first pages of this chapter.

Leading

You may, of course, choose a set value for this baseline-to-baseline distance. If you choose Auto, then the leading will be some multiple of the size of your type. The default is 120%, but you can choose another value in Justification—see “Hyphenation & Justification” (page 252).

Kerning

Most type designers have considered at least some value for the space between given pairs of characters. However, the number of possible combinations is likely far higher than any font’s designer will have included in that font. Thus, we often find ourselves manually kerning display type like headers and titles.

For the majority of our text, however, we could also choose to use Optical kerning, whereby InDesign attempts to calculate how to fit characters together. This is a quick option when we have different fonts next to each other and/or when the font designer hasn’t built adequate kerning pairs into a font. If you find optically kerned text to be consistently a little too loose, you may use Tracking to tighten it up.

Tracking

Tracking is, like kerning, space between letters, but it’s applied to a range of text rather than individual pairs of characters. It’s measured as a fraction of the current point size, which we refer to as 1 em. So choosing a tracking value of 5 means that an extra 5/1000 (five thousandths) of the point size is added between characters that use the paragraph style you’re defining. You may also apply tracking with the Character panel or the Control panel.

Case

Small Caps will leave full caps alone, but will convert lowercase characters to small caps (using the font’s specifically designed small caps, if present, or by shrinking full caps by the percentage chosen in the Advanced Type preferences).

All Caps will convert all lowercase characters to full caps, whereas All Small Caps will convert both upper- and lowercase characters to small caps.

Ligatures

This checkbox allows the use of special glyphs (characters) that replace an unfortunate collision of two or more others. Here, the f-i ligature:

No Break

This checkbox prevents a paragraph from having line breaks. Generally, this is an option I almost always reserve for character styles, as I do for underline and strikethrough.

Advanced Character Formats

It is usually frowned upon to squish or squash text, especially disproportionately. When I do need to scale text, it’s usually just a word or phrase, and I do so via a character style. When text needs to be lifted or lowered relative to the baseline, Baseline Shift can be employed. Skew is present so we can fake italics. But we don’t do that, do we? Finally, Language is for choosing which dictionary is used for spell checking paragraphs that use this style and for determining hyphenation.

Indents and Spacing

This is another key category of settings, as this is where we set Alignment (and other useful things). Besides setting these options in a paragraph style, you can find these in the Control panel or the Paragraph panel.

Alignment

If you’ve edited type in any other application, you are already familiar with Left and Right alignment, which leaves the other side ragged. Center allows both the left and right side to be ragged.

The four Justify alignments differ in how the last line of a paragraph is treated (as left, right, or center aligned). Full Justify forces the last line to march to the right edge of the text frame—usually not a desired result. The last two, Towards or Away from spine, can be useful to keep text symmetrical across a spread.

Indents

How far from the frame edges should our text be? Left and Right Indent control that.

You can have a different left indent for the paragraph’s first line (First Line Left Indent) or a different right indent for the last line (Last Line Right Indent). Use First Line Left Indent rather than a tab: it’s much easier to establish and maintain. You may create a “hanging” indent, where the first line is farther to the left than the other lines. To do this, you have to set the Left Indent first, then set the First Line Left Indent to a negative number no larger than the Left Indent.

Align to Grid

This forces each baseline to align to the baseline grid set in your Grid preferences. One does this to ensure that baselines align across columns for a clean, professional look. There are other ways, but most find this method easier than using the same leading for all elements. I find that using Align to Grid sometimes creates larger than desired gaps between some elements, so instead, I calculate all my leading and set Space Before and Space After to equal my body copy’s.

Space Before and Space After

The space above the previous line is not created with an extra paragraph return. The style for that subhead has 14 points of Space Before assigned to it (above its leading, which is greater than the height of its characters). The larger headers have more. Now note the subhead at the top of this page. Since it’s the first line of this text frame, InDesign intelligently doesn’t add that space, whereas extra paragraphs would cause an unsightly gap.

Space Between Paragraphs Using Same Style

Consider a long list, before and after which you need space. Space Before and Space After will accommodate that, but that often produces too much space between each item in the list. Before InDesign CC 2019, we would have needed three styles: one for the first list item, one for the last, and one for all the others. Now we can specify the space between consecutive paragraphs that use the same style. See the following figure for a visual example.

Ignore Optical Margin

The Story panel has an option—its only one, in fact—to enable Optical Margin Alignment for an entire story. This attempts to make text margins look straighter (from a distance) by offsetting glyphs based on their relative density. Thus, a capital “T” may be slightly outdented and a quotation mark much more. Styles with Ignore Optical Margin checked are “opted out” of this.

Tabs

When we press the Tab key, a tab character is produced in the text. To show it (and other normally hidden characters), choose Type > Show Hidden Characters or use the shortcut ⌘-option-I/Ctrl-Alt-I. Unlike a space, which is relative to the current point size, tabs throw text to a fixed position. The default is only marginally useful, however, so we set our own.

The position to which text is moved after a tab character is set by a tab stop. InDesign sets automatic stops every half-inch. This is rarely where we need them. We set our own using the Tabs panel, although in principle we could also do so in the Paragraph Style Options dialog. However, since it is remarkably difficult to use the latter, we’ll focus on the panel.

Note: The Tabs panel is the only panel not accessible from the Window menu! You’ll find it in the Type menu.

A solid rule of thumb is to have one custom tab stop for each tab character we have or intend to have. While our cursor is still in a text frame, summoning the Tabs panel will cause it to be positioned nicely along the top of the active frame. If the panel is elsewhere on-screen when you insert your cursor into some text, click the small magnet icon on the right side of the Tabs panel to get it to jump atop that text frame. In the figure above, a tab was typed after a short phrase. Then, in the small gap over the Tabs panel ruler, I clicked just above the two-inch mark. That position was fine-tuned with the field labeled X: (the tab stop position field). Immediately, any of InDesign’s default (and always invisible) stops to the left of mine were eliminated and the text after the tab character aligned on my custom tab stop.

The first time you ever do this, it’s likely that the text will left align on that stop because the default is a Left-Justified Tab stop. However, you may wish for the following text to center around that position, or perhaps right align to it. With a stop highlighted, click on an icon for a different type of tab stop, or hold down option/Alt and click the stop itself to cycle through. Use the Tabs panel menu to repeat a selected tab.

Below, the text between two tab characters is centered around the first tab stop. The last bit of text in each paragraph has a decimal, so I used the last type of tab stop called Align to decimal (or other specified character) tab. What a mouthful! If there were another character on which I wanted the text to align, I would have entered it in the Align On: field, which becomes available when this type of tab stop is chosen.

Note: If a paragraph style is controlling the formatting of a paragraph to which you’ve added tab stops, you should redefine the style so it has this new tab information. Right-click on the style’s name and choose Redefine Style. Creating a style from text with tabs will record them.

Paragraph Rules

A rule is a line, generally a thin one. Paragraph Rules are lines that appear near the top and/or bottom of a paragraph. I emphasize “near” because although they are called Rule Above and Rule Below, they actually appear not very far after and not at all above the paragraph they’re applied to, without a bit of adjustment.

Although you can set these in an ad hoc way for any paragraph via the Control panel menu, I almost always set these in the context of a paragraph style. To enable a Rule Above or Rule Below, choose which one you want from the menu in the Paragraph Rules dialog box, then click the Rule On box. With Preview enabled, you should see an underline along either the first or last baseline of the paragraph. Choose how thick you want the rule to be with the Weight menu. Like any stroke, you may also choose a Type (Dashed, Dotted, etc.) and Color, which defaults to match the color of the text. Also similar to any other stroke, if the Type has gaps, you may choose a Gap Color to fill them.

The Width of the rule can be that of the column in which the paragraph appears or just as wide as the top or bottom line of text (for rule above or below, respectively). From there, you can adjust Left Indent or Right Indent, with negative values widening the rule. I have sometimes used this for creative effects that extend beyond the edge of the frame. But if you need to “stay within the lines,” check the box Keep In Frame.

Finally (although you may wish to do this step early), the Offset. This adjusts the position of the rule, with positive values pushing the line in the promised direction. That is, if it’s Rule Above, positive offset moves it higher; if it’s Rule Below, positive offset moves it lower.

In the past, I would use a thick rule to act as shading on one-line paragraphs like headers. Now, however, we have a dedicated feature for that.

Paragraph Border & Paragraph Shading

Sometimes one or more paragraphs really need to stand out. We might put them in a frame to which we apply a stroke, a fill, and some inset. We would then have to anchor that frame inside another so it moved with the flow. But it wouldn’t necessarily respect the column structure like the text around it.

Paragraph Borders and Paragraph Shading act like virtual strokes and fills, respectively, but with greater flexibility. Of course, you can have one without the other. Each can take its own Color. Each can have Corner Size and Shape (and each can be different from the other!)—see “Live Corners Widget and Corner Options Dialog Box” (page 226) for the choices here.

A marvelous witty fellow, I assure you:
but I will go about with him.
Come you hither, sirrah;
a word in your ear:
sir, I say to you,
it is thought you are false knaves.

The controls for the size of each are a bit intricate. Before deciding on how much the Offsets should be (positive is larger, negative smaller), determine from where each is measured.

The Top Edge can start at the top of the first line’s Ascent (top of a lowercase “d” or “k,” for example), or its Baseline (so the shading or border won’t include the first line at all!), or its Leading (its entire line-height). I usually choose Ascent.

Likewise, for the Bottom Edge of the shading or border, I most often choose Descent (like the very bottom of a lowercase “y” or “p”) rather than Baseline, which would miss those dangling parts.

The Width starting point can be either that of the Text only (excluding left or right indents) or that of the Column (including all indents). To be consistent with my usual vertical choices, I most often choose Text.

From there, I add what small Offsets I require to give an even amount of space all the way around.

Paragraph Border has the unique option to have different stroke weights on each side. This means you can have a line running down just one side of your text, or on both sides, almost like vertical Paragraph Rules.

If a paragraph splits across frames or columns, should a line be drawn across the bottom of the first portion and top of the next? If so, check the box Display Border if Paragraph Splits Across Frames/Columns. With this, any side borders will reach the bottom of the first frame or column and start at the top of the next with no horizontal border between them.

Oddly, there’s a control for both borders and shading in the Paragraph Border settings: Merge Consecutive Borders and Shading with same Settings. So, if you have multiple consecutive paragraphs that should be shaded without a break in between, you need to check this box. But what if you don’t want a border? Set the stroke weights to zero!

Finally, unique to Paragraph Shading, you may ensure that shading doesn’t slip beyond the edges of the frame by checking Clip To Frame. And to implement an interesting use-case suggestion, Do not Print or Export prevents the shading from being seen anywhere but in InDesign. This could make it easy to designate paragraphs as ones that need attention or should be left alone. For example, you may use shading in a template to literally highlight the paragraphs a user should edit.

Keep Options

These options help us to avoid finding the last line of a paragraph at the top of a column (known as a widow) or page, or the first line alone at the bottom of a page (called an orphan). If you’ve learned those terms reversed, you’re not alone, but these are the more widely held definitions. Using the Keep Lines Together checkbox, even the default to keep the first two and last two lines together, does wonders. The cost? You may end up with a space at the end of a page. Most consider that a fair trade to avoid those bereaved typographic elements.

If the paragraph we’re configuring 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’d set it to Keep with Next: 1 (or 2) lines.

Finally, to avoid breaking up one long story in order to always have chapter titles at the top of a page, for example, you could set their Start Paragraph option to On Next Page (or In Next Column, In Next Frame, On Next Odd Page, or On Next Even Page), depending on your layout.

Hyphenation & Justification

These help us set the whither and whether of hyphenating, and otherwise attempt to make our type look even and professional. Text that is justified (like this) often needs help to keep the space between words from becoming awkward. Hyphens help. When text is ragged on one side (as in left, center, or right aligned), many designers will forego hyphens altogether. To have hyphenation, we check the Hyphenate checkbox (in the Control panel, the Paragraph panel, or most appropriately, in the Paragraph Style Options). Once enabled, we can set rules and have engaging arguments about which options we should choose. There are at least two boxes I’d suggest unchecking: Hyphenate Last Word and Hyphenate Across Column. I’m never pleased to have to turn a page to find the second half of a word I started on the previous page. (Isn’t it interesting which word is hyphenated in this paragraph?)

When columns are narrow, the slider that gives more favor to either Fewer Hyphens or Better Spacing may help (or frustrate). The set of rules above may also make hyphens less of a plague, but they are really just guidelines that InDesign takes into account with other calculations. The Hyphen Limit is the number of consecutive hyphens you are willing to tolerate. The Hyphenation Zone will never come into play unless you have ragged text and disable the fabulous Paragraph Composer in the Justification settings, which I strongly discourage.

Other options in the Justification settings can make for more even spacing in your text, most notably, but not exclusively, in justified text. The matrix of controls show the Minimum, Desired, and Maximum values for each of three attributes: Word Spacing, Letter Spacing, and Glyph Scaling. For ragged text, only the central (Desired) values play a part. The percentages are calculated from the font’s designed settings. So, if you wish to decrease the space between letters by 8% of the space already present in the font data, you’d change the desired Letter Spacing to -8%. To increase the space between words by 10% of the designed value, you’d enter 110% for Word Spacing. The minimum and maximum are the windows of variation allowed in justified text.

Glyph Scaling is controversial. However, modest changes (~1%) should be very difficult to detect. As an experiment, I’ve altered the justification settings in the paragraph immediately above this one. I chose less variation in word spacing, but allowed more letter spacing and a tiny bit of glyph scaling. This had the benefit of eliminating the hyphens that had been there, with little or no negative impact on your ability to read it.

The only one of the last controls in Justification that one might alter is Auto Leading. If you would prefer it to be more (or less) than 120% of the size of the type, this is where you may change it on a per paragraph basis. However, since leading is so important to my documents’ grids, I almost always set it to an absolute value rather than auto. If you have narrow columns of justified text with words long enough to get a line to themselves, you can decide what to do when that typographical unicorn confronts you with Single Word Justification. We should leave the Composer set to the fine Paragraph Composer, which gives us better spacing throughout a paragraph and therefore our documents.

Spanning & Splitting Columns

Those who do newspaper layout, or at least layout articles in a way reminiscent of newspapers, like to have as much of an article as possible in a single frame: the headline, maybe a subhead, the byline, and, of course, the copy. Several columns may be desired for the article copy, but the headline likely needs the full width of the frame or, in the past, a separate frame.

Now we can use a paragraph style option called Span Columns for the headline (and the subhead and byline in the figure below), but allow the copy to traverse the columns. There are few options for spanning: over how many columns should a paragraph be allowed to span (choices are 2–5 or All) and how much space should be above and below this text?

Another challenge is the opposite concern. When confronted with a narrow list, for example, and a wide column into which to flow it, you may wish to use more of the available space. So we go to the Span Column feature (weird, right?), but choose Split Columns from the Paragraph Layout menu. The choices are more numerous because we have more gaps to define. First, however, we choose how many Sub-columns we want (in the figure, I’m using four). As with spanning, we choose some space both before and after. We also get to decide how much space is on the sides of our sub-columns: between them with Inside Gutter, and to the left of the first and to the right of the last sub-column with Outside Gutter.

If there’s a non-splitting paragraph after the ones that use a style that includes splitting, the split paragraphs will attempt to balance (divide evenly). If the list I used had just two more names, it would have balanced perfectly.

Drop Caps and Nested Styles (and Line Styles)

Paragraph styles control entire paragraphs. That makes them so easy to apply: with the cursor merely blinking in a paragraph, without the need to highlight even a single word, one click on a paragraph style’s name applies it to the paragraph, from the first letter through the (hidden) End of Paragraph marker.

Words or phrases that should look different (bold, italic, different font or color, etc.) are controlled by “Character Styles” (page 263). Those words in the previous sentence, “Character Styles,” are an obvious example. Sometimes, there are consistent patterns of formatting that we need: the first letter may need to be larger, or certain phrases must be italicized or bold in a certain order. Here are a couple of examples:

Drop Caps

The text below has a 6-line Drop Cap with a Character Style applied to it that sets a different font and color. Align Left Edge aligns the cap to the left edge of the column or frame (or inset if there is any). Scale for Descenders will include the descender of the letter, if present, in the calculation of the height. Thus, if your drop cap is actually lowercase letter (a “y” or “p,” for example), you’re still covered. Finally, you can drop as many Characters as you like or need. I hope you’ve noticed that the paragraph with the drop cap below is actually an InDesign tip.

Nested Styles

This cozy-sounding feature automatically “nests” character style–formatted text within a paragraph. In the following example, a caption paragraph contains data in a certain order with—and this is important—specific glyphs/markers in reliable places. More plainly, I’m using a Forced Line Break (a.k.a. “soft return”) and commas to separate some of the data. If I used this caption paragraph style throughout a document, I’d be careful to use those characters consistently in each one.

I first created the two character styles I wanted to nest. That’s the subject of the next section of this chapter. One of those styles, called “‘plate’ or ‘fig,’” changes the case to all caps, the color to gray, and the size by about 15%. That’s the formatting I wanted for the plate number. The second, for the title of the work, is called “300 italic” and increases the weight of the text and italicizes it. For the text between the two (the artist’s name), I wanted no character style applied.

To create these Nested Styles, I created the paragraph style for the caption, setting the Basic Character Formats first, then clicked on the Drop Caps and Nested Styles category. A click on the button New Nested Style begins our walk through the paragraph starting at its beginning. From the first menu, which at first reads [None], I chose “plate” or “fig”, the style I made for that first bit of text. Next I chose how far it should go. From the second menu I chose through (rather than up to); I left the 1 in the field that follows; and finally, from the last menu (which can also be an entry field!), I chose Forced Line Break.

Note: Even with the Preview enabled, your choices will not display until you either proceed to the next one or click in the bit of gray space beneath.

Upon creating the first nested style, I picture myself standing at the point in the paragraph immediately after its effect. In the example above, that would be just after the Forced Line Break. From that point all the way through the comma following the artist’s name, I want no character style applied. I have to tell InDesign that so I can format what follows that comma. So another New Nested Style, choosing [None] as the style, through, 1, and, since the last menu has no comma, I type one into the hybrid menu/field. Previewing this is not thrilling since we’re asking that nothing change here.

But the last New Nested Style will show us something. The previous has moved us along to the title of the piece, where I chose the style 300 italic. How far? I didn’t want the weight change and italics to affect the comma after the title, so I chose up to this time, quantity 1, and, again, a comma in the field.

One can apply as many nested styles as a paragraph can accommodate. I suppose I could have applied more here, but I showed restraint.

GREP Style

The Find/Change feature usually replaces content, and with GREP, it can do so with somewhat abstract text patterns. You can read about the magic of “GREP” (page 308). A GREP Style is more like find/decorate. We don’t change the content beyond formatting it. Nonetheless, it’s a powerful feature that almost all of the text in this book is experiencing. In this book, when I type “the Layers panel,” a character style is automatically applied to the key phrase to color it.

Most paragraph style formatting is defined by the Basic Character Formats, and often by Nested Styles. But we can apply character styles automatically to certain text patterns. How?

In the Paragraph Style Options dialog, get to the GREP Styles controls. Click New GREP Style, and a terrible interface appears to control this lovely feature. Why “terrible?” Because it doesn’t appear interactive until you interact with it! Click on the words Apply Style to discover that you can choose the character style that will be applied.

Click below that on the words To Text to enter text and/or the code for the ongoing grep query InDesign will execute. When a match is found, the style you chose gets applied to it. It could be as simple as the name of your company or product, and the style may render it in an appropriate font and color. In the case of this book, we look for something more abstract: a capitalized word preceded by “the” and a space and followed by a space and “panel.”

After reading the Find/Change section of this book, the query for this will make far more sense. But here’s a quick breakdown:

Bullets and Numbering

InDesign paragraph styles can maintain the appearance of lists, sub-lists, and all the way to sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-lists! (That’s nine levels deep, if you’re counting.) These paragraphs can begin with bullets (which can be any glyph, not just traditional bullets: “•”) or with “numbers” (which can be letters or Roman numerals, and can contain some arbitrary text, too). Numbered paragraphs can be interrupted by pages of non-numbered ones and can resume smoothly where they left off.

To create a bulleted list style, create a new paragraph style and go to its Bullets and Numbering section. For List Type, choose Bullets. For the Bullet Character, choose one that is listed or, to choose more, click the Add… button to the right. That button will present you with every glyph in the chosen font, but you can choose from any font installed in your system (be sure to check the box for Remember Font with Bullet when choosing the character).

Set the Text After. This is usually a tab so its position can be set absolutely (independent of the text’s point size). You cannot type tabs and many other special characters into the available field, but the small menu to its right presents a list of any character you may want here. What appears in the field is a metacharacter: “^t” is a tab, for example. Just below, you can designate a Character Style to be applied to the bullet and its Text After.

Last, and very conveniently, there are settings for Bullet or Number Position, where you can set Left and First Line Indent as well as the position of the tab you likely used above. If you have a Left Indent wider than the bullet and its text, the Alignment setting becomes effective. Choosing Right Alignment may right align the bullet (or number) to that position. Multiline list items with hanging indents upset this, however, but it’s great for short items to keep a consistent space between the bullet or number and the text that follows. With long items, or when text wrap is present, I forego this option, and sometimes tabs in favor of em or en spaces after my bullets.

If you choose Numbers for the List Type, many more choices appear. You can have multiple, independent numbered lists in the same document if you name each one. For example, numbered section headers and numbered figures or captions can happily coexist (and not interfere in each other’s numbering) as long as each has its own paragraph style and the list itself is given a name. To name a list, choose Numbers as the List Type. Just below that menu will be one called List, from which you choose New List…. In the dialog box, enter a name that you can access later from other styles (perhaps sub-lists that should get number hints from this one).

Note: It is by naming a list that it can be numbered sequentially even in different stories and frames. For captions that should be numbered, like the ones in the following example, this is critical. Note the checkbox Continue Numbers across Stories.

The Level indicates whether the list is top level (1), a sub-list (2), etc. Be sure to choose the same name for a sublist as you might have for the more primary one with which it should be associated. That is, the name designated for a level one list should be chosen for level two, three, and so on if they are related. InDesign refers to more primary lists as “Previous” ones. So, the Restart Numbers at This Level After: checkbox (in the Numbering Style section) activates when you choose level two or greater. Notice in the example below that the paragraphs that begin with a letter restart “numbering” after each header.

Configure the appearance of your list. In the Numbering Style section, choose a Format: letters (uppercase or lowercase), Roman numerals (uppercase or lowercase), or Arabic numerals, with or without leading zeros.

Just below the format we can figure the Number itself. This can be an entire phrase and doesn’t even need to include a number! You may type words in this field and add special characters via the small menu icon just to the right of it. “^#” is the “number” itself, whether it’s a letter or a number. As with a bullet, you may apply a character style to the number string, too.

Right-clicking when your cursor is within a numbered paragraph shows a menu that will include Restart Numbering and Convert Numbering to Text. The latter will allow you to edit a bullet or number as you would any other text. Unless it is converted to text, it will remain an entity that you cannot directly select or edit. If it is converted to text, it will no longer automatically number itself when numbered paragraphs are added above it or deleted.

Numbering order within a story is automatic and intuitive. The numbering of standalone frames, like captions, is usually intuitive. However, when these are on the same page, the numbering is tied to the order in which the frames were created. This can make it difficult to add a new numbered caption between two existing ones. There is a loophole: if these frames are anchored to another story, the numbering is tied to the order in which the anchor markers occur.

Character Color

When editing a paragraph style, this is where you choose the color of the text. If a swatch doesn’t currently exist in the color you desire, double click on the Fill Color box and you can create a swatch on the fly. Oddly, after creating this swatch, it doesn’t always appear in the list. However, if I visit another part of the same dialog box, like Basic Character Formats, then return to Character Color, that swatch is now available.

It’s generally best for legibility to apply no stroke to text unless it’s really large and of a heavy weight.

OpenType Features

OpenType fonts can offer fabulous features. To unlock those features in either paragraph or character styles, we use the options in the OpenType Features section.

Figure Styles

The way numbers (figures) are displayed. Some fonts offer the full set of variants:

Stylistic Sets

Some type designers provide entire sets of alternate glyphs. You can enable one or more by selecting them from this menu. Brackets indicate a nonexistent set.

Underline & Strikethrough Options

Underlines and strikesthrough (strikethroughs?) are much more common to character styles (in the next section of this chapter) than paragraph styles. Like with Paragraph Rules and Paragraph Borders, one can choose weight, color, and offset. At first, it looks like these are the same feature with different starting points: underline along the baseline, strikethrough higher. With offset, they can be at the same altitude. The difference? Strikethrough prints above the text, Underline below.

Output Tagging

When exporting as HTML, whether on its own or embedded inside and ePub, or as a PDF, each paragraph can be tagged in a way familiar to anyone who does web design. In HTML, larger bits of text are usually tagged as a paragraph (p) or as a header (h1–h6). You can indicate which tag is most appropriate for a given type of paragraph through its paragraph style option called Output Tagging.

Style information (anything decorative) is usually contained in an accompanying CSS file. Upon export, InDesign writes the style information as a CSS class, the name of which matches the paragraph style.

So a paragraph governed by a style named “body” might export HTML like:

<p class=“body”>Some text.</p>

With CSS like:

p.body {
font-family: “Kepler Std”, serif;
font-size: 11px; …
}

A subhead might be more appropriately marked up (tagged) like this:

<h2>A Subtopic Here</h2>

With or without a class, as we see fit. If HTML and CSS are unfamiliar to you, that’s okay. This is the last you’ll see of either, unless and until you read chapter 8, “Output” (page 338).