From the course: InDesign: Advanced Styles

The [Basic Paragraph] style - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Advanced Styles

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The [Basic Paragraph] style

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- [Instructor] This movie is about the basic paragraph style. Every document has a basic paragraph style in square brackets at the top of your paragraph styles panel. You can't delete it, so, what's its purpose and what, if anything, should you do with it? The properties of basic paragraph determine the formatting of the text when you type on your page. Switch to my type tool, click and drag to create a text frame, and insert some text into that frame. Now, you can edit basic paragraph just like any other paragraph style where I click on it, choose Edit, and you can change whatever formats you want right here. So, if there's something that you will always end up changing, maybe you have a typeface that is used as your house style, then it might be worth changing basic paragraph and I say it might be because, if you're going to be applying your own defined styles, then basic paragraph becomes irrelevant, but let's say, for whatever reason, I want all of my text to start out red. So, I'll change the definition of basic paragraph to red and you can see that updates that text right there. Now, I've also done that to point out a potential problem with basic paragraph and that is if you base styles upon it and then copy text from one document to another, you could be in for a nasty surprise. So, let's say I want to create another style. Get my type cursor, insert it into that story. I'm going to zoom in, CMD or CTRL two, so I can see what I'm doing. I'll just type the word Headline, I'll select that, increase its size, I'm pressing CMD Shift, more than, and I imagine that this is how I want my headlines to look. I'll cretae my new paragraph style based upon this. I'll call it head and I will base it on basic paragraph. So, now I have two paragraphs here and let's imagine that I wanted to copy this text to another document. I'll select the frame, CMD or CTRL C to copy it, and now create a new document, CMD or CTRL N, I'll just accept these settings and CMD or CTRL V to paste. And you can see what's happened, the appearance of the text has changed, it's no longer red, and that's because the basic paragraph in this document is different from the basic paragraph in the other document. So, basic paragraph, best avoided for the most part. Having said that, if there are certain things that you know with certainty that you always want to change, you might want to change the definition of basic paragraph and make that a quote on quote default font and the way you would do this is by closing your documents, I'll close that, and I'll close that, and then you are left with your default styles. Now, I've added these default styles, you won't have those, but the important thing here is that if I edit my basic paragraph and I make it 36 points, for example, now when I create a new document, my text is going to start out at 36 points and that's going to be the case for every document I create from this point forward. So, that's the purpose of the basic paragraph style. It's in all of your documents, we can't delete it, so, learn to live with it, I would suggest just ignoring it.

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