Lessons

Lesson Info

Build Text Styles

So a lot of times when you're working, you have sort of a rotation that you're going to see again and again. And I'm missing a character here, so I'm missing a font. That's all right. So things you might see over and over again: Title, Header, Subhead, I've got a sub-subhead, I've got a First Body Paragraph, and I've got this item that's down here. So you might want things to… When I hit Return, I automatically want it to go to the next type of header that's there. And that's what I have set up in here and this is Next Style. So I'm actually going to save that for the end. We'll go back to what we just had here. This is the one we've been working on and let me show you how I put that together. So I have this headline, subhead, and body text, and I probably want those in the same paragraph or in the same text frame. Right now, they're in separate ones, just that's how we built it. And I want to make sure that when I'm typing along, when I hit the Return after the headline, it changes to...

a subhead. When I hit Return from subhead, it automatically changes to body text for me, so that I don't have to keep going over to the Paragraph Style panel and making those changes. So I can do that as well, but you have to have everything first set up. It doesn't have to be necessarily neatly defined, but you do have to have the names already there and then you work kind of backwards. So I built it from body text going up to the headline. Now I'm going to start with the headline and I'm going to say, "When I hit Return from a headline, I'd like it to automatically switch to the subhead." So I'm going to go into the Headline, and, again, I don't want to click on this because I might accidentally apply headline to my body text. I don't want to do that. I'm going to say Undo. So I want to make sure I either right-click on this or use all my modifier keys and say, "Okay, I want to define headline and I want to tell it what the Next Style is." That's what this means here. So we've had Next Style, Same Style for everything. That's the default. Next Style. When I hit Return from Headline, I want it to be Subhead. So now when I hit Return, it will automatically change. Then when I go into Subhead, I want it to be Next Style, Body Text. Or I might have one called First Paragraph which I do in that other sample. Because sometimes, the first paragraph has that Drop Cap built into it and we'll come back to that once I show Drop Caps as well. And then in Body Text, it says Next Style, Same Style. And that means when I hit Return, it doesn't change to a different style, and the reason for that is that especially with body text, I don't know how many paragraphs I'm going to have of body text. Every time I hit Return, it's going to stay in body text. So I need to stay in that. So then what happens is when I'm typing in this document, I just created a new page, I'm just going to create a text frame and I'm going to start with the first one in that cycle which is the headline. Right? So I'm going to type Headline and I'm just going to hit Return and type Subhead. And when I did that, it automatically changed to that new style. When I hit Return, it's automatically in body text. And then when I hit Return again, it's still in body text. So I haven't told it when to switch. So when I'm ready for a new headline, I'm going to have to manually go over and say Headline. But as soon as I do that and hit Return, there we have that same rotation of styles again and again and again. So that's when you're typing it, you start with the first one and it automatically rotates down through that cycle. If you only had one paragraph of body text and you knew that was going to be consistent, you could tell Body Text Next Style is Headline. So think if you were doing like a directory of names, addresses, and phone numbers, and all that. Well, addresses gets a little tricky because sometimes you have more than one line or two lines or whatever. But let's say you were doing a name and a title and an email and it was always going to be one, one, one, and that's it. No one got any special treatment, nobody gets extra lines. You could say line one, line two, line three, and then on line three, you could tell it, "Next Style is line one." So if it's always going to be one line of each, you could just keep typing and it's automatically going to be styling for you and you don't have to think about that at all. But if you bring in text from somewhere else, so, for instance, let's say I have this. I'm just going to finish this body text, so I have a little bit more in here. And I'm going to select everything here and I'm going to go over to the Paragraph Style and I'm going to tell it, Basic Paragraph. And that's going to strip it back to the basic paragraph that's built into the document. Notice it went back to Minion Pro which is what comes with InDesign. That's what it says is your default font. So I have that. And let's say I brought this in from somewhere else, I have all this text. Well, what I can do is I can grab the first round of the set, so all the way through the last body text one. This is basically one cycle of this. Right? So I have all that text selected. I'm going to go over to Headline, which is the first one in the rotation, right-click or Ctrl+click on that, and say Apply "Headline" then Next Style. And there's also another one that pops up occasionally called apply that, then Next Style, Remove Overrides. So if I had overrides, it would also offer to strip those out. So I'm just going to say, "Apply that," and when I do, it automatically formats all of that. So, again, if you have this rotation, this constant pattern that you can pick out, we can keep assigning it to that. Now, if you only had one line of each, again, in that example where it was one, two, three, one, two, three, you wouldn't have to do each individual set. You could select all the text that came in, a directory of 5000 names with name, title, and email. You could select all that text, hit that first one, say, "Apply style number one then Next Style," and everything will automatically style for you. But in this case, because they have multiple lines, sometimes they're one, sometimes they're two, I need to do each set individually. But you can see how quickly we can format that. And that's exactly what happened over here. I'm going to grab this. And I don't think the pull quote is actually formatted in that. I'm just going to say Basic Paragraph, and then I'm going to tell it that the first one is the Title, Apply "Title" then Next Style. And as soon as I do that, it automatically did title, header, subhead, sub-subhead, and the first body paragraph, and actually grabbed this one. This should have been the first body paragraph here. There we go. And then all the body text after that. This was some other pull quotes and captions that I had in there. So anyway, that's how we do Next Style so that we don't have to manually change it every time we hit Return if we know it's going to be consistent. I do that a lot on headers and subheads. I don't usually worry about it with body text, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have one-line header most of the time. So that's kind of Next Style, so we can kind of get this, like I said, this pattern going. The other things that we can do are Nested Styles, and that includes, our friend, the Drop Cap that we were discussing. So I can nest items inside there. In fact, I'm going to grab... Let's see. I'm going to create a new page in this document because I have my body text set up and I'd really like to keep that going. And if I have a pattern within a paragraph, so before we were doing, each paragraph followed a pattern and we changed the style. But what if that style needs to change while it's within a paragraph? We can do that as well. So for instance, let's say I had some text here, and I'm just going to make poor Bob Smith. He's always an example, right? And I want to say he's the owner, and I'm going to say, "is pleased to meet you." All right. So this is going to go and say and report or something like that and we're going to list all the officers on the team or whatever. So we're going to say a name and a title and then some regular text. And I'm going to select all this and I'm going to tell… Let's make that body text, right? So that's what it looks like. But I really want is I want this to be bold and I want the title to be italic. So that's what I want it to look like. But I have 800 of these names. We have a lot of officers. So we have 800 of these names. I don't want to have to go through and change the name and change the title on each one. I would like that, because it fits a pattern, I would like it to do the work for me. So I'm going to undo and undo, so everything is just body text to make sure it's all cleared out and I want to build this. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to move this over and I'm going to go into this Body Text. In fact, I'm going to create a new style called BioText. So I'm just going to click + and I'm going to call this BioText and I'm going to Apply the Style to Selection. So I make sure that this is indeed BioText setup, so that now any change I make to BioText, we'll be able to see that happening. So I'm going to click on BioText and I'm going to go down to Drop Caps and Nested Styles. So this is where those Drop Caps live. This is where Nested Styles live. We'll do Drop Caps in a minute as well. So in this middle section, Nested Styles, it says, "Click Nested Style button to create a new one." Well, I want to create a new one. What I want to do, what I'm nesting is I'm nesting a character style within a paragraph style. So instead of me manually applying that character style, I'm putting it inside. And the reason I'm able to do that is it fits a pattern. So everybody can hopefully see that the pattern that's here is I have parentheses around a word. So it knows to come up to a parentheses and do something, then the text inside the parentheses is something else, and then everything afterwards is just the normal style that we have set up. So I'm going to create a new Nested Style. And first, I need to tell it… First, you need to realize, this is actually a menu. The styles don't really look like menus, but these are all individual menus. This is one of those things that isn't just super obvious. So I click New Style and the first thing I want to do is choose which character style I would like to nest. So let's... Actually, I'm going to make it just red just so we can actually see it. Well, actually, no, we'll do bold. And we can't really see anything yet. So I'm going to click in this little gray area just to see it and I don't really see anything happening yet because I don't have a preview on. And right now, it just bolded that first word. Well, I want to bold the names. I could do two words, but what if they have three names, right? So I don't really want to count on how many words. I need to tell it everything that goes up to that first open parentheses. So this is also a menu and I have a choice, up to or up through. So it doesn't include the thing or does it not. In this case, it does not. I want to go up to the first or the second or third. I can put in whatever number I want. And then here, I have a pull-down menu, first, Word, Sentence, Character. Well, I don't know. What I want to do is go up through that first opening parentheses. So if you don't find what you need in that pull-down menu, just select here and then type in the thing you're looking for. So I want it to be bold up to that first open parentheses. And I'm going to click down here so I can see the change. So now it's bold up till that point. And then I'm going to create a new Nested Style and now I'd like it to be italic, but up through the first closing parentheses. So I click OK. So now it's bold to here, italic to here, and then I'm done because after that, it's going to just put whatever we've assigned for BioText. All right. So we say OK to that, and now, everything's automatically assigned. I'm going to take that text that we just created. I'm going to strip it back to Basic Paragraph. So we bring it in, this is what it looks like, and I think I need to style that. I need to put my cursor in that paragraph and I just need to tell it it's BioText. Boom! Everything is done for us. The great thing is as soon as I hit Return, that's a new paragraph, so now that pattern starts all over again. So I can have... Let's see. We'll have Sally Jones and then I put an opening parentheses and it automatically italicized it. She's also the owner. So as I type, it automatically changes those Nested Styles that are there. So I don't even have to manually assign that. It does that automatically for me. So anything that fits a pattern, you can do that. And if it's not something that we've actually printed, it's not something like a hyphen... In fact, if I put just a dash in here or a hyphen, you notice now everything is bold because it's never found that opening parentheses. It's still waiting for that and it's never hit that yet. But I could do that if it's a repeating item. If there's not one actual character that I need, I can do things like Em spaces. So instead of using a regular space, I could put an Em space in here. And those live in the Type menu under White spaces. So I could click on Em Space, and then that way, it looks kind of the same as a regular space or find one that fits the right size. We have lots of spaces to choose from. But then that way, I know that that Em space is there. And there's also a special character for that, that is, insert special... I'm sorry, it is the Insert to Here. Is it? No. I'm sorry. It's End Nested Style Here. I can actually put that in there and tell it that's where it ends if I don't have anything special. I find that putting that in there, it's so far deep in that menu that it would be quicker to manually apply the styles. I generally don't use that at all. But anyway, that's a great way to nest those in there and get that... Like I say, if it meets a pattern, set up that pattern so that you don't have to manually go and do that. And again, I can, at any time, if I change body text to something else, BioText is based on that, everything else will update as well. So that, again, gets put into that group that's there. I'm going to come in here. Let's go one more. I'm going to show you... This is a newsletter that we did in the "How To Build Your Own Newsletter" and this is actually one that has a little bit more. This actually has all the styling in it. So I'm going to close up some of my links here, get this out of the way. So I actually have styles built into all of this. I have things like captions, sidebar headers, body text, sidebar text. I have a lot of different things together. So I have sidebar text and I have first paragraph sidebar. And actually, I need to jump back and go to the first paragraph really quickly as well. But I realized that when I start building something like a newsletter, anything else, I get tons of styles going. Even in this one, we have several styles. Look at all those subheads that we have. And at some point, we need to organize those. We need to put those in groups. All right? Before I do that, I am going to jump backwards because I forgot to show you the first paragraph that I wanted to show you. It has the Drop Cap on it. So what I want to do first is I want to find out... I'm missing this font. So let's actually just see what we have. So I'm just going to give it some kind of fancy font here. Let's see. This is perfect. We'll call it Sail. So what I did, now I have a Character Style. This Character Style should be set up. I should have a Drop Cap character style that's here. So in my Drop Cap character styling, I have just said what I want it to look like. I want it to be in this other font, so I'm going to change this to the font we have. It's in brackets, which tells me I don't have it, and it's in this nice magenta. So I set up a character style for what my Drop Cap character needs to look like. I'm not telling it how many lines it is or anything like that, that's going to be done in the paragraph styling. So I have a font setup with a color. That's what I want my Drop Caps to look like. And now, when I create this paragraph style, which is First Body Paragraph, so I basically assigned it Body Text and then I based it on that. And I also told it when I hit Return, it will flip into Body Text. But I come back down to that Drop Caps and Nested Styles and this is where I tell it my Drop Cap takes up three lines and one character. So again, I can make it bigger if I wanted to. So I'm going to do three lines. It's only one character instead of something like two or three and I choose my character style that I created for that. So I tell it I want the Drop Cap to look like that. So that's how we nest that in there. So it's nested in there as well, so that at any time, if I decide I don't like the color of my Drop Caps, I'm going to actually edit the character style. I would come in here, Change the Color. Let's make it blue instead. And now, every place that I've used that Drop Cap, whether it's the first paragraph or every paragraph or it's in my title or anything like that, that all ripples through all of those changes as well. So that's built into that. That's nested. And the other thing that's nested in this first paragraph, what makes this first paragraph different is that I have this line of text that's in small caps and it doesn't matter how wide or how narrow this paragraph is. It automatically keeps that first line in small caps. So what I had to do for that is I created a character style called Small Caps and the only thing that's there is I turned on Open Type Small Caps, and that's something you set in the character panels. So I set that there and then back in this First Paragraph, Paragraph Styling, down under Drop Caps and Nested Styles, I have something called Line Styles. So instead of a whole bunch of character styles, it says, "What should I do with this first line of text?" And it knows that a line is just until it gets pushed behind, not necessarily a hard Return, but when it gets pushed down to the next line. Like when I changed the size of that frame. So I tell it New Line Style, I give it a character style, I give it the Small Caps one, and I just basically, the only thing I can tell it, is how many lines, the first one, the two, three. That's it. But it's always going to be the first and then number of those. So I say OK. So for that first line, it will automatically be in those small caps that are there. All right. So that's how I make my first paragraph. And again, when I hit Return from that, it automatically flips to Body Style.