How to Use Character Styles in Indesign
Indesign, the typesetting and layout program, has a number of powerful tools that let users make beautiful print documents quickly and efficiently. One of these tools is the character styles palette. Using character styles lets you save build of a group of characters, and apply that build to any other text in a document with the click of a button. Character styles keep track of and govern everything you can do with the character palette and text menu: font, font style, font size, tracking, kerning, leading, vertical and horizontal scale and more. Using character styles will dramatically cut the amount of time you spend laying out character styles in a document, and the longer the document the more time you will save.
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Instructions
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When to use character styles
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Create and use character styles when you will use the same character look in different spots throughout a publication, i.e. titles of chapters, footnotes or even bodies of text.
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Use character styles when crafting the look of your characters. Creating character styles as you move from look to look is a great way of creating a history of the styles you create, and gives you more options for character looks moving forward.
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Use character styles whenever you create a unique character look. Even if you only use that character look once, it's good to be able to create more if you change your mind later, or want to add more text to the first section.
Creating character styles
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Find and bring up the character styles palette. If it isn't already on the screen you can find it under the "windows" pull-down menu in the main menu bar.
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Lay out your text. Do this by using the text tool, the character palette and the text menu.
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Select the text body once you have the text arranged how you want.
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Click the "new character style" button on the character style palette. It's the button to the immediate left of the "delete character style" button, which looks like a trash can. You have now saved the selected text as a character style.
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Name the character style. This isn't necessary but is helpful in the long run. Do this by double clicking on the style name in the character style palette.
Working with character styles
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Apply the character style to other text by selecting all target text and clicking on the character style you want applied to it.
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Make modifications to a character style by highlighting the text in a text body and making any modifications you want.
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Make the character style modifications permanent by clicking the "new character style" button. The modified text will now be assigned to the new character style. Name the new character style.
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Use the keyboard command apple+Z to move undo changes. Unlike the paragraph styles palette, there is no button to erase modifications made to a modified style. All changes are permanent once they are made.
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Double click on a character style (not on the name of the style) to bring up the advanced character style options palette. From here you can set many advanced style options, such as bullets and numbering, hyphenation, and opentype options.
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Tips & Warnings
Making modifications to a text body won't actually affect the paragraph style associated with that body. If you want the modifications to carry over to other text bodies, you must apply that style to all the text bodies you want modified.
Always name your character styles. Keeping track of ten or twelve unnamed can be a tough task, eating time and defeating the purpose of using character styles Name styles after page numbers, content or distinctive text features.
