256 Character style highlighting

- [Voiceover] Can you find all the bold and italic text on this page? I mean, you probably could find it, especially if you zoomed in and looked carefully. But it would take work, right? And, hey, we are trying to be lazy here! We want to minimize hard work! So, there are a couple of tricks that pro InDesign users take advantage of in order to see formatting more easily when you're editing or proofing a document on screen. First, there's this little feature that appeared in the February 2016 release of InDesign CC.

To find it, you look inside the Paragraph Styles or the Character Styles panel and look for this little plus sign in the upper right corner. When you click that button, suddenly you see stuff highlight on your page, like this word over here and this line down the side of this paragraph. This highlighting indicates local formatting. That's any manual formatting that's on top of the paragraph or character styles that you've applied. The vertical line to the left of our paragraph means there's local paragraph formatting applied here, like maybe the indents are different or something.

And the highlighted words or phrases mean there's local character formatting, in this case bold or italic text. Now I can remove that formatting. For example, I'll double-click on this paragraph, which switches to the type tool automatically and places the cursor inside that paragraph. And then, over here inside the Paragraph Styles panel, I'll click on the Remove Local Overrides button at the bottom of the panel. When I click that, all the local overrides are removed. Now, I still see a little blue line there, but I think that's just a bug, a screen display artifact.

So I'm gonna turn off that plus symbol and turn it on again. And, yep, it's gone. So that Plus button is great, but it will not show you any italic or bold text that was applied with a character style, like these styles that I created over here in the Character Styles panel, Italic or Bold. Character Styles are not considered local formatting. They're styles, right? But sometimes I'd like to get that same kind of highlighting for these, so I can see them quickly on the page without having to strain my eyes.

So, here's one option. Add a highlight to the character style to give it some color. For example, I'm gonna come over here and right-click on the Character Style called Italic. That brings up the context menu where I can choose Edit. I like using the right-click technique because it lets me edit this style without actually applying it to anything. To give this a highlight, I'm going to choose Underline Options in the list on the left. Then I'm going to turn Underline on and I'm going to give it a really thick underline, like maybe 10 pts.

I'll make this a solid line and I'm gonna set the offset to just a little bit down, like -2 pts. Now here's the trick. You wanna give it a color, maybe bright yellow. To see the effect, turn on the Preview checkbox and move the dialog box out of the way. Can you see that now? There's where my italic character style has been applied. It just jumps off the page. Let's click on OK and do the same thing to our Bold style. I'll right-click on Bold, click Edit, go to the Underline Options and I'll turn it on.

I'll do the same thick style, let's make it solid. And this time I'll give it a different color, maybe pink or magenta. When I click OK, I can easily see where that Bold character style has been applied on the page. And of course, I could go through the rest of my character styles adding that highlighting to each one of them. But here's the problem. When it comes time to print or export my PDF, how do I turn off all that highlighting? Well, you could go through and change them one at a time, but that's pretty inefficient.

So this question came up at a recent PePCon conference. PepCon is one of the conferences that Anne-Marie Concepción and I produce each year. And fortunately, Sandee Cohen was there and she came up with a great answer. You might know Sandee as the author of the InDesign Visual Quickstart Guide and other books. Sandee thought about this problem and she said, "What if you made one style to rule them all?" Let me show you how. I'm gonna click inside this paragraph up here where there's no character style or local formatting applied.

Then I'm going to go to the Character Styles panel menu and choose New Character Style. I'm gonna give it a name. I'll just call it highlight on or off. You can call it anything you want, of course. Now I'm going to click on Underline Options and I'm going to turn the Underline On checkbox on. That is, there's a check mark inside that checkbox. And I make that point because, remember, that in character styles, checkboxes can be in one of three states, on, off, or a line in the middle.

The line means ignore it. But in this case, because a highlight is currently on for all these other styles out here, I want this checkbox to be on as well. That's all I'm gonna do. I'll leave everything the same. Now I'll just click OK. After I make that style, I need to base my other styles off of it. For example, I'll right-click on Italic, choose Edit, and I'm going to change the Based On pop-up menu to highlight on or off. That's the style I just created. Then I just click OK.

And now I'll do the same thing to the Bold style. Right-click, Edit, and base that on highlight on or off. Finally, click OK. And, of course, if I had more character styles that had highlighting, I'd wanna base those on the highlight on or off as well. Now you can see that nothing really changed here. But this is a one-time edit, that is, you take a little time now to set this up but you can save a ton of time later. Because the next time that you want to toggle that highlight, like turning them all off, all you need to do is change this one character style, the highlight on or off style.

I'll right-click on that, choose Edit, change Underline Options and change this one checkbox to off. Now when I click OK, you'll see that all that highlighting got turned off. Now this highlighting on the left did not get turned off because, again, that's local formatting, not character styles. Let's fix that. I'll double-click on that word and apply Italic. I'll double-click on those words over there and click Italic. And this word, here, should be Bold. There we go. Now there's no local formatting on this page.

Let's turn all the highlighting on one more time by right-clicking on highlight on or off. Click Edit, go to Underline Options, and this time I'm going to turn highlight on, not that dash, but on. When I click OK, you'll see that now everything is highlighted, everything that has any of those character styles applied to it. So a big thanks to Sandee for remembering that basing one character style on another can be a huge time saver.