289 Display overriding styles

- [Narrator] One of the newer features Adobe InDesign CC is the ability to visually see where your styles are being overridden. And what that means is, we all know that paragraph and character styles should be created and applied accurately and consistently throughout the document so that when you do the print-out or when you export to EPUB, that all of the formatting looks good, that you don't have a paragraph that is mysteriously one point smaller than the other paragraphs in the story and so on.

So here we're looking at a student catalog and we can see it looks pretty good, right, just visually checking it. And I'm clicking in various paragraphs and I'm looking over here on the right to see if a tell-tale plus sign appears, like let's see, anywhere. Hah, here we go. I double-clicked on this word, and I see a plus sign after body, meaning that an override has been applied. And it tells us here that italics has been applied. Well that's kind of a pain to have to click around in the entire document looking for overrides so instead, you can choose this little icon at the top of the paragraph styles panel or the character styles panel, either one, they do the same thing and that quick apply that's over here.

The one to the left of that is, let's see if I could get the tool tip to show up. Maybe they haven't done a tool tip yet. So I'll click it and what we're seeing is highlighting on style overrides. So it's actually a toggle. If I click it again, it turns off. Click it again, it turns on. Now this is only in normal view that you can see it. If I switch to preview mode by pressing the W key, you can see it's not printing. It's not actually going to print out or export to PDF. It's only when you're looking at it in normal mode that you can see it.

And like I said, it makes no difference if you choose it from the character style panel, or the paragraph styles panel, let's look up here on page one. Whoa, so all of this. Well it's not surprising that these were tweaked because you only need to set them once. But looks like everything else looks pretty good. Now let's say that you wanted to correct this, which is a good idea, here's an instance. Let me zoom in. The word character is being highlighted and if I look over here, body with the plus symbol, apparently somebody changed the size of this text to nine points, as you can see up here.

And it's actually, actually be 9.5. So I'll option, or alt-click, and this name of the style to get rid of the overrides in the paragraph and then the highlighting goes away. Now if you have an entire paragraph, let me zoom out, see if we can find one, that has been changed and overridden like say, let's do this one here. I'm going to click inside here and make it centered, then you get a bar to the left of the text frame. And that means something having to do with the paragraph attribute was overridden.

Sometimes you might have an entire paragraph highlighted like here and that means a character attribute was overridden for the entire paragraph. I think it's a little confusing personally because you would fix both of these by editing the paragraph style or by option or alt-clicking in the paragraph style's panel menu and not the character style panel menu like that to get rid of it. You may wondering, can I change the color? No. Is there a difference in the color between the paragraph bars and the character highlighting? Some people said one is brighter than the other, maybe the character is brighter than the bar, but I think they're just too close to call.

You can assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle this highlighting on an off. It is inside edit keyboard shortcuts and go down to the panel menus and find character styles panel or paragraph style panel and look for the command to toggle, they're in alphabetical order. Toggle the style override highlighter. You can assign a keyboard shortcut. Or you can use quick apply. If you press command and enter or return, that invokes the quick apply dialog box, and all you need to type is over, which I've experimented with and found that that will make up the first option.

Then press return or enter to toggle it on and toggle it off. Press command-return-enter again and that will do the opposite. One thing to keep in mind is that when you have highlighting showing, do not save it to IDML, because if somebody with an earlier version of InDesign opens it up, it's going to be highlighted in a different color, a red color, and there's no way for them to turn it off. (laughing) So make sure that you hide this before you export to IDML and hopefully in an upcoming update, the Adobe engineers will fix that.

Now if you don't have CC, don't despair because there is a free script that will give you the same utility. And it's here. It's called StyLighter 1.4. Go to indiscripts.com and look for it, and it works on Mac or Windows CS4 all the way through to CC. I have that loaded is CS6 in my scripts panel here. And if I double-click it, you get a dialog box, and this goes actually way beyond the highlighting overrides. The default is that it always colors overrides with red.

You have to turn on activate preview mode to see that, but the other feature is here that I'm not going to go into, that you can, say show me every place that head one has been applied in a particular color. Kind of neat so you can scroll through your document looking at colorized hits of the paragraph and character styles quickly and see where they have been applied. But their default is just use it for style overrides, turn on activate preview mode and you'll see the same kind of highlighting with the bars and the lines through them that we saw in CC.

Now this one looks completely fine, but if I made this centered, then it puts a bar to the left of the paragraph. And if you then fix it by making it left or clicking inside, let me just change to advanced modes, we can see paragraph styles. If I click here and then option or alt-click, then it make it non-italic and the red markup goes away. So that's called StyLighter, and it's supposed to work also in CC 2015 but I haven't tried it.

Well there you go. That is the new feature in CC 2015, this little icon right here, toggle style override highlighting.