Creating text styles in InDesign

- [Instructor] Styles, wherever you can apply them are a no brainer, because when you create a style and you use that definition, you only have to change the definition to change everything that is depending on it. Character and paragraph styes are really the fundamental elements of styling in InDesign. So what we're going to do in this movie is create a character style and a paragraph style for our body text and then another paragraph style for our heading text.

When you create a paragraph style, it's not necessary for you to highlight the whole of the text, just simply clicking inside the paragraph you want to change is sufficient. So how do we go about it? Well, we've got our character options here to start off with, which we could do. It's always a good idea I think to style in the document and then create an actual style based on it. So we were aiming here for Kinesis Pro3 here in 10 point set on a 12 point leading, and we weren't using the automatic version.

Okay, so we were doing that, I'm going to switch out to the paragraph options now, and what we're going to do is add six points space after, rather than putting those lines in between the paragraph, okay? In fact, once I tap through that, you should see that paragraph now has a small gap underneath it. And for now, I think that will do. Range left is all just fine there. So to create a style, all you need to do is come up to this symbol here, this is called a pilcrow, a bit more pop quiz knowledge for you, but if I click on that and choose new paragraph style, the style dialogue box opens.

So I'm going to call this Lila Body Copy just here. Going to make sure it's not based on anything preexisting, and just as a thing to note, you never, ever, ever base anything on the default basic paragraph, just in case the document goes over to somebody else and their copy of InDesign has a different definition to yours, it'll all go horribly wrong. Next style just means apply the same style here when you're continuing to type, and that's for typing really, not really at any other time with maybe one tiny exception.

And shortcuts need to be applied by a num pad, so I tend to leave those alone, 'cause I work on a laptop quite a lot and the num pad doesn't work there, or it doesn't even have one. (laughs) So there you go. We can go through the basic formats here, so that's everything that we've applied, just there inside of the local formatting. We can change the spelling language here, that's always useful to do if you need to do it. Mine's just fine as it is there, thank you very much. Indents and spacing, the one thing I am going to do here is align the first line of my paragraph to the baseline grid, which we visited earlier, and you may well have forgotten about by now, but there you go.

So that will align that, that means that paragraphs of different sizes and other things would align also if you're doing that. That's really a deeper topic, and I just kind of glossed over that just then, but it is something worth looking into. When I hit OK, that's it. The paragraph style is created, however, not yet applied. Okay, so you can see here at the moment, this is just saying basic paragraph plus, so it's got all the properties of basic paragraph, plus a bit. So let me apply it, if I apply body copy just there, there you go, that's 10 on 12 point leading.

In fact, let's select absolutely everything and do Cmd + A here, or Ctrl + A and then this has gone blank, because it's got more than one thing. Choose Lila Body Copy just there, perfect. Then you can see now how that's all nicely spaced out, like so. A character style is meant to be an override to a paragraph style. Now I've installed a couple more fonts on this particular file, and you may well have noticed if you're working along with it and opened it that you got asked to sync a couple of other fonts.

That's because curiously enough, during the recording of this title, Kenesis seemed to open up and become available for sync globally, and I don't know quite what was happening there, or if it was just something that they took off the pay wall, but I decided to re-record this particular movie and include some of those typefaces. So let me show you what the override is. If I went here, for example, if I thought all of these different things like Lila radiance facials, they could be in italics.

That's when I can create a character style to do that for me. So I'll switch out to the character options here, and what I'm going to do is, at the moment it's Kenesis3 here, Light, and if I click just here, you'll see I've also got Light Italic just there. Okay, so that's the only change I want to make. So I'm going to go up to my character style options, which are just here, and represented by the letter A, and if I click here, I'll choose new character style.

Now this one I'll just call Body Italics, like so, and the trick here is to only complete what you would like to be changed. So for example, I'm not going to fill out anything in the font family, because I want it to apply to anything that's got a light italic variant. And if you look at this list, it covers every available different eventuality inside of this, so loads and loads of different options. But light italic I know I have.

I'm just going to deselect adding this to my CC library here, okay, and pretty much I think that's it. So I'm going to hit OK, and again, I'm just going to apply it, like so, you can actually do that by the way in the setup. At the beginning, you can actually put in apply to selection, but I elected not to do that. And if I just go for lava here, and I'll apply that just there. And so I'm at hot stone massages there, I can actually do this even quicker, using something called quick apply.

If I hold down the command key and hit return, that would be Ctrl + Return on the PC, the quick apply dialogue appears, okay? And I called this Body Italic. By typing B, you can see that's actually come to the top of the list. If I hit return, it's applied. So if I went for azure lug, I can't say azure lagoon hydration all of a sudden in my excitement, if I select that and Cmd + Return, it's already selected, so you see, it's really easy for me to do this very, very quickly indeed.

Okay, so Cmd + Return, Return, because it's already there and I could work though that and so on. So there you go, that's how a character style overrides a paragraph style. We'll just finish off this movie by creating a new paragraph style for the heading just here. So I'm going to switch back to my character options, and in the character options, I'm going to make this Fira Sans, which is in my recent menus at the top here, okay? And this was Fira Sans Medium just here, 'cause I've got quite a lot of that font installed just there, and this one was going to be 14 points there, so I'll just dial that up on an 18 point leading.

There we go, so if I put 18 just in there, and it's got a nice gap there. I'm actually going to remove that hyphenation, we'll just go into the paragraph controls here and turn hyphenation off. I can then create a new paragraph style, it's not based on anything again, and this one will be called Lila Heading just there. There you go, that's how we can apply those styles to our text and make our lives a lot easier.