InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 19. Setting Up Styles

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating and applying paragraph and character styles

• Working with nested styles

• Modifying style-formatted text

• Modifying styles

• Importing styles

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 this would take considerably more time than using a cookie cutter, plus no two cookies would look exactly the same. Think of styles 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, styles are indispensable.

InDesign lets you create two types of textual styles:

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

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

Note

InDesign calls these styles, not style sheets as other programs such as Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress do. I personally prefer style sheet because that term has a longer history in publishing terminology and because style is also used to indicate font styles such as boldface and italics. But in this book, I'm sticking with the InDesign term style.

Note

InDesign also lets you create styles for objects such as frames and lines, as Chapter 12 explains. And you can create styles for tables and cells, as covered ...