Chapter 20: Setting Up Style Sheets

Overview

If you were assigned the task of making 500 star-shaped cookies, the first thing you'd do is find a star-shaped cookie cutter. Of course, you could shape each cookie by hand, but not only would this take considerably more time than using a cookie cutter , no two cookies would look exactly the same. Think of style sheets as cookie cutters for formatting text. They save you time and ensure consistency. If you'll be using InDesign to create long documents that require considerable text formatting, style sheets are indispensable .

InDesign lets you create two types of style sheets:

• A character style sheet is a set of character-level formats you can apply to a range of highlighted text in a single step.

• A paragraph style sheet is a set of both character- and paragraph-level formats you can apply to selected paragraphs in a single step.

In one respect, style sheets are far superior to cookie cutters. If you use a cookie cutter to create hundreds of cookies and then find out your cookies are the wrong shape, you're out of luck. But if you use a style sheet to format hundreds of pieces of text and then decide you don't like the look of the styled text, you can simply modify the style sheet. Any text you've formatted with a style sheet is automatically updated if you modify the style sheet.

Tip ‚  

When it comes to using style sheets, it's as important to know when not to use them as it is to know when to use them. For short documents ‚ especially one- pagers such as business cards, ads, and posters ‚ that contain relatively little text and don't use the same formats repeatedly, you're probably better off formatting the text by hand.

Tip ‚  

If you create multiple editions of a particular publication ‚ for example, a form, a daily newspaper, a monthly magazine, or a corporate business card ‚ you'll want to create a template. A template is a shell of a document that contains all the layout elements necessary to create the document ‚ including style sheets if it's a multipage publication ‚ but no content (except content that appears in every issue, such as copyright lines and mastheads). You use a template as the starting point each time you need to create a new version of a publication. For more information about templates, see Chapter 7.