Paragraph styles are pretty easy to understand, but character styles can be a little more confusing. They are just as important, though!

Character Styles - What are They?

Character styles are very similar to paragraph styles. The difference is that character styles only apply to the selected characters. That should be easy to remember!

When you make a new character style, all the details are left blank. The only things that change with a character style are what you enter. For example, you have a paragraph style applied that is Caslon, regular weight, 10/12 (don’t understand that “fraction”? Go read about leading) and you want to make certain characters bold. Create a new character style that only changes the weight of the text to bold. Leave everything else blank and apply the style to the selected characters.

The awesome thing about character styles? They’re reusable! I can now apply this bold style to my Century Gothic headers. And if I change my mind and want to emphasize with italics instead? It only takes about five clicks instead of three hours to find all the bold items and change them to italic (and that’s hoping that you got them all on the first run through).

Character Styles - When to Use Them

Use character styles whenever you are changing the weight, size, color, etc. Always.

I like to use character styles especially for the time notations AM and PM. To me, these look funny when set lowercase and they are always too big when sitting next to numbers when in uppercase. I make AM and PM one or two point sizes smaller than the rest of the text size and save a character style. This is what that character style would look like:

See how the only bit of information is the smaller point size? I could reuse this with any paragraph style, no matter the font or weight. All this style does is make the point size 8 (unfortunately it’s not dynamic; I can’t set it to just be “2 points smaller than original.” Maybe someday!)

Character Styles - How to Use Them

This is the only part where the paragraph and character styles differ. While you can apply a new paragraph style by just having the cursor active in the paragraph, you’ll have to actually select the characters you want a character style applied to. Then go to the Character Style Palette and click on the desired character style.

Time to Switch!

Now you know the basics. It’s time to switch to InDesign! If your last excuse is that you are just so familiar with the Quark shortcuts that you will be slowed down and frustrated with InDesign, ha! You can set the InDesign shortcuts to match Quark! No more excuses!

Besides that, the default InDesign shortcuts should be fairly intuitive for you if you’ve used any other Adobe Creative Suite products like Photoshop and Illustrator. There are some differences, but being a part of the family is one huge thing InDesign has going for it. Plus, you probably already have it if you bought any of the CS packages, so it’s not like you really need to go out and buy another piece of software anyway!

In this series we’ll talk about InDesign basics, Master Pages, Paragraph and Character Styles, InDesign Layers and common shortcuts—the keys to really start unlocking InDesign’s power.