From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Creating and applying paragraph styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Creating and applying paragraph styles

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- Styles are a way to take a whole bunch of formatting and give it a name and InDesign lets you create styles for character formatting, paragraph formatting object formatting even table formatting and styles are important because they let you apply or change a whole lot of formatting with a single click. So they really boost productivity. For example, here in this book, you can see that a bunch of texts over here needs to be formatted and to do that we should open our Paragraph Styles panel over here in the doc. Now over here on the left-hand page, I'm going to double click on the text to switch to the Type Tool. When I click in the text on the left, I can see in the paragraph styles that this has the Basic Paragraph style applied to it. Now we want to avoid Basic Paragraph as much as we can. It's much better to apply our own paragraph styles and in this case we have one, let's go ahead and make the paragraph styles panel longer. Now I'll click in the first paragraph and the text frame on the left and then I'm going to apply flower headers to it, simply by clicking once on the Paragraph Style. You can see that it applied a whole bunch of formatting to that paragraph, including the font, span columns and more. Now notice that I did not have to select the entire paragraph to apply it, you can, if you want to but all you really have to do is click your cursor inside the paragraph. Okay, let's do a few more, first, we'll click in the next paragraph and then apply the Common Name style and then these paragraphs down here I'll just drag over a little of all of them and those are all going to be a paragraph style called Body Copy. Now you can see that we were able to format this whole bunch of texts really quickly. If I had to do that manually applying first the font and then the size and the letting and all that, that would have taken much longer. By the way later in this chapter, I'll talk about how you can edit these styles if you need to change the formatting but first let's talk about how to create your own new style. I want to create a new paragraph style for the information down here this little fact and the easiest way to make a new style is to create an example that you're going to base your paragraph style off of. Now fortunately, we have one of those over here on the right. I've already formatted this with the right size and font and everything. So to make a paragraph style based on that example, you can just put your text cursor in it, then go to the Paragraph Style's Panel menu and choose New Paragraph Style. Now here's the important thing because the cursor was inside that paragraph, it grabbed all of the formatting and it dropped it into this dialog box. So now all you really need to do is give it a name. I'll call this Info. Now of course, if you want to, you can go through each of these panes, one at a time, setting the font and the style and the scaling and the indents and all that but as you can see, that would take a lot longer than just doing it once on your page and then sucking all of that information right up into this dialogue box. Now, before we click, okay, let's go back to the general pane and I want to do one more thing. I'm going to turn on the Apply Style to Selection check box, you don't have to do that but it's convenient. This way it'll make this style and apply it to whatever was selected on my page. Oh, also notice that you can apply a keyboard shortcut to your style here. That can be super helpful for commonly used styles but you just have to be sure that you're using a shortcut that isn't already reserved for some other InDesign feature or else it won't work. Okay, now let's try applying it. I'll click OK, place my cursor over here in this paragraph style and then I'll click on the Info paragraph style that we just created. Boom, it worked and this shows one of the most important reasons to use styles and that is consistency. Every time you apply it you know, you're getting exactly the same formatting. Paragraph styles are one of the most important productivity features in InDesign. The more you use them, the more efficient you'll get.

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