Applying Styles and Style Overrides | InDesign CS4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide

Defining text styles is just half of the process. You reap the benefits of your planning when you apply styles to text.

You can apply paragraph and character styles as you type new text, or you can add the styles to existing text .

An example of paragraph and character styles applied to text.

To apply paragraph styles:

Select the paragraphs.

Tip

You do not need to select entire paragraphs. As long as a portion is selected, the paragraph style will be applied to the entire paragraph.

Click the name of the paragraph style.

or

Type the keyboard shortcut.

You can override the paragraph style by applying a character style or local formatting.

To apply local formatting:

Select the text.

Use the Control Palette or Character palette to format the text.

Tip

A plus (+) sign next to the paragraph style name indicates that local formatting has been applied to the text .

The plus sign next to the paragraph style name indicates that local formatting has been applied to the text.

Rather than use local formatting, I prefer to use character styles on text. That way if I want to make changes later on, I can just redefine the character style.

To apply character styles:

Select the text.

Tip

You must select all the text you want to format with a character style.

Click the name of the character style.

or

Type the keyboard shortcut.

Character Style Strategies

InDesign character styles only need to be defined with a single change from the paragraph attributes.

For instance, if you want to change text to italic, define a character attribute with just italic as the definition.

You can then apply the italic character attribute to many different paragraph styles, even if they are different typefaces or point sizes.

You can even define a character style with no attributes. That type of character style can be used to tag text so that it is easily found later.

This is very different from the character style sheets in QuarkXPress. In that program you need a different character style sheet to apply italics to each different typeface.