From the course: InDesign Secrets

172 Making a character style change only the tint of your text - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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172 Making a character style change only the tint of your text

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- You know how to make a Character Style, right? You open the Character Styles panel, you Option- or Alt-click on the New Style button at the bottom of the panel, and then you fill this out, choosing what formatting you want to apply. For example, if I to go to the character Color Pane, I could choose a color, like this magenta color. Now if I apply this Character Style to some text, it'll just change its color to magenta. Okay, but what if you want a Character Style that just applies a tint, like 50%, not red 50% or magenta 50%, but just 50%? So, if you apply it to green text, you get 50% green, if you apply it to black text, you'd get 50% black. Well, first we need to turn off this color. And I don't mean setting it to None, because that's literally no color, the text would actually just disappear! Instead, check this out. You hold down the Command key on the Mac, or Control on Windows, and then click the color that's selected in this list. That deselects it, so it's no longer going to be applied, and no other color will be applied either. So, we wanna change the tint, right? Well, here's the Tint field. Unfortunately, it's grayed out. I can't select or change anything in here. So how're we gonna make a Character Style that changes the tint? Okay, ready for the trick? Apply a color, any color, doesn't really matter, and then change the tint. For example, I'll set this to 50%. I'm gonna give it a name, let's say, "50 percent tint" and then I'll click OK. Now you'll see it show up in the Character Styles panel, right there. So then, once you've made the Character Style, you can go back and edit it. I'll edit this by right-clicking, or Control-click with a one-button mouse, and choosing Edit. Up comes the Character Style Options dialog box, and I'll go back to the Character Color pane, and now, here we go, remember, you can deselect a color by holding down Command on Mac or Control on Windows, and clicking on the color. Now it looks like the tint disappeared too, but it didn't, watch this. I'll click OK, and now I'm going to double-click on this text to switch to the Type tool, and I'll select a little bit of that, and click on my Character Style. When I deselect here, you can see that it changed to 50%. I'll do the same thing over here on this "o" 50%. You see how the style just changes the tint, but leaves all the other text formatting alone? That's pretty cool! Now why does this trick work? I don't really know, but it does, and that makes me happy.

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