Creating Character Styles in InDesign CS2

By Claire Blinman

Text styles can have a profound effect on the look and feel of a document. InDesign has some elegant functions designed to help you create, import and export text styles.

Text handling is one of InDesign's strengths. A style is a combination of several different text attributes that affect or alter the text's appearance. Styles can be applied to characters, paragraphs or documents. With InDesign, you can change some or all of the text in a document at one time by redefining or modifying the existing style.

InDesign comes with a default text style. This default is what InDesign uses when you have not applied any other style to the text. You can modify the default style, but you cannot rename it or delete it. You can create new style. You can rename or delete any style you create.

InDesign provides Styles palettes to make working with styles more convenient. You'll find separate palettes for character and paragraph styles. To open the Character Styles palette, you may select the Character Styles tab in the application window, or you may choose Character Styles from the Type menu.

You can create a new character styles as needed by selecting New Character Style from the Character Styles palette, and give your new style a name. You may base your new style on an existing style, or define an entirely new style. To use an existing style, select the style that will serve as a basis for the new style in the the Based On menu. Make whatever modifications you'd like for the new style. Once you've made your changes, if you want to return to the base style, click Reset To Base. All of the modifications you've made to the base style will be reset and you may start over or abandon the new style.

If you'd like to make a shortcut to your new style, click the Shortcut text box. Press Num Lock and choose any key combination of Alt, Shift, or Ctrl and a number from the keypad. Letters and non-keypad numbers are not acceptable as shortcuts. Once the shortcut key combination is set, you can use it to apply the customised style to your text. Specify all of the basic attributes that should be reflected in the style and click OK. Your newly defined style is ready for use.

You may want to check Adobe Indesign here.