From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using character styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Using character styles

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- Now that we know how to use Paragraph styles, Character styles will be a breeze. There's one big difference between defining a Paragraph style and a Character style, however. Paragraph styles always define all the characters in paragraph formatting, the font, the size, the indents, everything that describes a paragraph. But Character styles are different. They can be set up to define just one attribute, like just the font or just the size, or the size and the color but nothing else. Let's see how it's done. First, let's jump to the previous spread of this document with option or alt page up. Now, I'll place my text cursor inside this paragraph and let's zoom in with a command plus or a control plus. Let's type that a few times. Because we're going to be working with Character styles, we'd better open the Character Styles panel, which you can find here at the bottom of the dock. Or if you don't see that in your dock, you can open it from the Window menu. You can see we already have some Character styles created here, and we can apply one of those to some text simply by making a selection. And I'll just select some text here. Then I'll come back here and click on the Character style. In this case, Latin text. That's great. It applied all that formatting with one click. Now, let's create a brand new Character style. And just like when making a Paragraph style, I prefer to make styles by starting here on the page. I like to make my Character styles based on an example, so I'm going to select a word over here, like this word roses. Let me pan over a little bit so we can see this better. Let's go ahead and apply some formatting to this. For example, I'll change my Control panel to character formatting, and let's make this SemiBold. And how about we change the color? I'll choose this RoseRed color. And while we're at it, let's go ahead and make this a little bit bigger, maybe 11 points. Okay, now that we've made an example, we can make the Character style. While that text is still selected, let's go back to the Character Styles panel, and then in the Panel menu, we'll choose New Character Style. Now all that formatting that we just did, and in fact just the changes we made, are sucked up here into the dialog box, the font size, the color, and so on. So really, all we need to do is give it a name. I'll call this flowers. Then I like to turn on the Apply Style to Selection checkbox. All right, let's click OK. Now, if you did not turn on that Apply Style to Selection checkbox, then you'd simply have to go back to the Character Styles panel and click once on the style. No big deal. Now, every time you want to use that same Character style, you simply have to select some text and click once on the Character style. That's it. Let's do one more. Now, I do want to be really, really clear about something here. Character styles should only be applied to one letter or one word, or maybe a sentence or two, but never an entire paragraph. This is really important. I find a lot of InDesign users go in and select an entire paragraph and then apply a Character style to it. That is not what Character styles are for, and it can cause you headaches later if you use them like that. Character styles are only for a piece of a paragraph. If you need to apply formatting to an entire paragraph, use a Paragraph style. That's what they're for. Oh, also, I should mention a common gotcha about Character styles. You want to be careful to never click on one of these styles when no text is selected on the page, because if you do, whatever style you click on becomes the new default style for the whole document, and so you'll end up accidentally applying it every time you create a new text frame. It is incredibly annoying, and it's a common problem for InDesign users, so you always want to make sure the Character Style panel is set to none, unless you're actually applying a style. Other than that, you can see that Character styles are easy, and they make the process of formatting a document really fast, as long as you remember to use them.

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