Character Styles

As mentioned in the paragraph styles section titled “Drop Caps and Nested Styles (and Line Styles)” (page 254), paragraph styles control entire paragraphs. We rely on character styles to format exceptions within paragraphs. A good, fair, and recurring question my students ask is, “why bother?” We can simply highlight text, reach up to the Control panel and choose some different formatting. True, but there are several concerns.

Consistency

Even with something as seemingly trivial as setting text to italic, consistency can be a challenge. In just one font family—Garamond Premiere Pro, for example—I have 17 variations of italic! If we initially chose Light Italic Display as our standard italic, it would be so easy to miss it later on and accidentally choose one of the others. Inconsistency like this is a hallmark of amateur layout.

However, if we create a character style named Our Italic, we can apply it even more quickly (one click) and with reliable consistency. As the formatting of an exceptional word or phrase becomes more elaborate, using not only a different font, but maybe a different color, tracking, or size, the likelihood of getting it right diminishes and the advantage of speed becomes more obvious.

Most large organizations have (or probably should have) style guides to maintain their brand. Paragraph and character styles go a long way to ensure that one is working within those guidelines. When the cursor is inserted where a style has been applied, the style’s name is highlighted in the Paragraph Styles panel. If there is no plus sign (+), all is well. When there is a plus sign, it means some “override” (formatting that deviates from the paragraph style’s definition applied without a character style) is present.

Protection

When confronted with overrides, especially where style guides are enforced, the temptation is to simply clear them all. Many folks do, especially if their inner enforcer is lively that day. But what if the override was perfectly within spec, using approved fonts, colors, etc? It wouldn’t matter. That override, along with any others that may have violated our style guide would be eradicated if we merely highlighted all the text and clicked the Clear Overrides button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel.

However, if that text had been formatted with a character style, no override would have been indicated, and the formatting would have been protected when other overrides were cleared. Since clearing overrides is often a step in the cleanup of a document before publication, character styles can protect “authorized” formatting at that stage.

Overrides can occur even if we don’t introduce them. Depending on the procedure we follow, placing Word documents can introduce many overrides, some quite strange. When that happens, I apply character styles to protect the overrides I wish to keep, and then I clear the rest.

Creating a Character Style

There are two main ways to create a character style: using some selected text as an example, or not. As we edit a document, we may discover the need for a new character style—text that should be bold, violet and italicized, a different font, etc. We apply that formatting to some text, then, leaving it highlighted, we create a new character style. Usually, I use the Character Styles panel menu or the button in the Control panel and choose New Character Style…, or I option-click/Alt-click the Create New Style button at the bottom of the Character Styles panel.

An alternate approach, especially for simple formatting, is to create the style with nothing selected and choose the attributes it should control. We can usually anticipate the need for italic, bold, and a few other simple variations within our paragraphs. I will typically create these early so they’re ready to go. Remember, only the attributes you choose are included.

The character style formatting categories are simply a more limited selection of those we find in paragraph styles. Review those starting with “Basic Character Formats” (page 245).

In the Character Styles Options dialog box (called New Character Style when first creating a style), checkboxes have three states: checked (attribute is applied), unchecked (attribute removed), and with a hyphen (Mac) or a square (Windows), indicating the attribute is ignored.

Applying a Character Style

With text highlighted, a click on the name of the character style applies it to the selected text. You may also use the Character Styles menu in the Control panel.

One method that becomes convenient with practice is Quick Apply. If you are writing or editing in InDesign, it’s likely that your hands are on the keyboard. The shortcut ⌘-return/Ctrl-enter summons the Quick Apply panel with your cursor in its text field. Simply start typing the name of the character style you want to apply, and the list of styles (and menu items and scripts) below will shorten, perhaps even highlighting the style you want. You can use the arrow keys to highlight the style, too. Pressing return/enter applies the style and dismisses the Quick Apply panel. It’s slow the first few times you try it, but after that, it lives up to its name.

Editing a Character Style

To edit the style later, I 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 you may not want to apply the style to what’s currently selected. 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. You may find it mysterious that text you just created is bold when the paragraph style applied doesn’t include bold.

Warning: To avoid trouble, occasionally deselect everything, ⌘-shift-A/Ctrl-shift-A, then inspect your styles panels. Anything that’s highlighted is a default. Be sure to set the default in the Character Styles panel to [None].

You can use Quick Apply to edit a style, too. Summon the panel with ⌘-return/Ctrl-enter, highlight the style to be edited, then use ⌘-return/Ctrl-enter again. Who needs a mouse?!

Finally, you can select text that has a character style applied, change it manually (via the Control panel, for example), and then right-click the style’s name and choose Redefine Style.

Output Tagging

As with paragraph styles, character styles can help tag text that is exported as ePub or HTML. The only difference is that the tags are applied inline (to a few words, perhaps, using the span tag) rather than to blocks (like the p tag for paragraphs).