From the course: InDesign: Advanced Styles

Paragraph styles and character styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Advanced Styles

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Paragraph styles and character styles

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- [Narrator] In this movie, I'll talk about the difference between paragraph styles and character styles. Paragraph styles are global. They apply to the whole paragraph. Let's just zoom in on this document. I'll double click with my selection tool into the text frame, press Command or Control two, to zoom into a 200% view. Paragraphs are designated by paragraph marks and we can see where those paragraph marks are when we have our hidden characters shown. We can turn these on, last item under the Type menu. In order to see them, we need to be in the normal view mode. If I put my cursor into a paragraph, and because the formats apply to the whole paragraph, just being in the paragraph is sufficient, and then apply another paragraph style, we see the appearance of the text change. Character styles, on the other hand, are applied to exceptions within the paragraph style. For example, they're used for things like film names, book titles, but in this document, they're used for botanical names. I would need to make the selection then come to the character styles panel and apply the character style. So if I set this back to None, it goes back to the base formats of the paragraph style, and then if I want to give it emphasis, I can apply the italic character style. Paragraph styles are the big picture. Character styles are the smaller subset. If we look at the control panel when we're in our Type tool, all of the options on the control panel, the character formats and the paragraph formats and all of the options on the control panel menu can be incorporated into a paragraph style. On the other hand, only the options on the character formatting options can be incorporated into a character style. While all paragraphs benefit from a paragraph style, some paragraphs benefit from both a paragraph style and a character style.

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