Styles are typically used in long documents to streamline the formatting of text. Each style has a range of attributes associated with it, so that when the style is applied to text, all of the associated attributes are applied in one hit. Like most word processing and page layout programs, InDesign has two types of styles: paragraph and character.
Paragraph styles
Paragraph styles apply to complete paragraphs and contain both those attributes which are always applied at the paragraph level, such as alignment, indentation and tabulation, as well as formatting which applies at the character level, such as font size and text colour.
Character styles
Character styles can be applied to any selected text, contain only character formatting attributes and are useful where different text properties need to be applied within the same paragraph.
nested-styles
nested-styles offer the user a way of embedding a character style within a paragraph style. They can be used to format paragraphs in which a different format is used at the start of the paragraph to the one used for the rest of the paragraph. In order for a nested style to be used, you need to tell InDesign when to stop using the nested style. This can be done either numerically (e.g., for the first character, the first two words, etc.) or up to the occurrence of a certain character (such as a tab, space, etc.).
In this tutorial, we will look at two examples of using nested-styles. Firstly, we will see Adobe InDesign can use a nested style to create bullet points, using a bullet whose font is different from that used for the main paragraph.
In the second example, we will look at how a nested style can be used to format any number of characters at the start of a paragraph up to the first occurrence of an em dash.
|
