Chapter 8. Working with Style

Although the title alludes to elegance, this chapter is actually about working more productively. For years, page-layout software has allowed you to define each element in a document with a distinctive definition for its typeface, point size, alignment, and other formatting. So a headline is given one style name, body text another, captions another, and so on. These styles allow people to make very intricate changes to text with a single click.

It didn't take software developers long to realize that the convenience of text styles could also be applied to objects. That's when graphic or object styles were added to software.

The same concept was then added to web pages, to format and position elements using the feature called cascading style sheets.

In this chapter we'll look at the various types of styles in the CS2 applications, how they are similar, and how they differ. Most of our discussion centers on the text styles in InDesign and Illustrator, but we'll look at the object styles in InDesign and the graphic styles in Illustrator, as well as the Cascading Style Sheets found in GoLive.

Behind the Scene: Where Did Style Sheets Get Their Name?

Styles or style sheets are not recent computer terms. They date all the way back to the 1800s, when book and magazine publishers would print up sheets describing the proper use of typography and terms. For instance, in the 1890s a proofreader at the University of Chicago Press prepared a page of typographic instructions. That single sheet grew into a pamphlet, and the pamphlet grew into a bookthe Chicago Manual of Style, first published in 1906.

Today's electronic styles are found in word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word, page-layout programs such as Adobe InDesign, and even illustration programs such as Adobe Illustrator. Web designers have also taken the term and used it as part of Cascading Style Sheets, which are used to program the appearance of web pages.