Waching daily Jul 24 2018

Hi, I'm Erica Gamet with InDesign Secrets. I want to show you the quick and easy

way that I create—and then refine— paragraph styles. Instead of thinking up

all the attributes that need to go into a style, I always start with some styled

text, then create the style from there. I want to make sure all those little

things are thought of too, since they'll become part of my style and of course

any style that I base on this style. If there are attributes that you want in

all or most of your styles, like default kerning for example, set those with no

document open. They then become the default for all new documents going

forward. I usually create a text frame, fill it with some placeholder text, then

just start styling. If I'm building a document that will have a defined

hierarchy like a newsletter—with body text, headline text, captions, etc.—I

usually start with the body text. Be sure to start with the text that sort of sets

the tone for your document, because you'll probably want to base other

styles on this first style, eventually. So start styling the text…and when you get to

a point where you like what you see, just save it as a style. Don't worry if it

isn't exactly how you want it to look… I'm never completely satisfied with my

first incarnation of a style. We're gonna make changes to that later. So just

select some text. I just drag my cursor across that text. And usually when we

deal with paragraph-based stuff, we only need to have our cursor in a paragraph

to affect it. But paragraph styles also include character-level attributes like

font, kerning, etc. So select some text, go to the Paragraph Style panel—and if it's

not open, go under Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles—then Option- or

Alt-click the Create New Style button at the bottom of the panel. That opens up

the New Paragraph Style Options dialog box. And look! Everything that we did to

that text is already here as part of the style. So all we need to do is name this.

I'll call this Body Text. And I'm gonna go ahead and say OK. BOOM! We have our

paragraph style. I'm gonna select all the text of my document and assign that

style to it. As we work in our document, we'll probably realize there's some

things that we need to change…and that's no problem. Let's say I want this text to

be a little bit smaller with some custom leading. I'm gonna select just some text.

Maybe I'll select a whole paragraph, in this case I'm gonna select some. And I'm

just gonna make a couple changes. I'm gonna go ahead and tell it it's 16-point

and I'm gonna give it some custom leading…18-point.

And when I do that, I get this little plus symbol on my style and that means

that I've applied manual overrides. And we don't want those in our document. Like

why bother setting up and using my styles if I'm just gonna make manual

overrides to everything? No, we want to get rid of those. So we have a couple

choices. We could click the Clear Overrides button at the bottom of the

panel and that just resets it back to the style the way we had it defined. Or

we can tell InDesign that this is what we want the style to look like from now

on. And we do that by choosing Redefine Style from the panel menu. Now the style

matches the text that we had selected. Another way to do it, is you can

right-click or Control-click on a style name and choose Edit and make the

changes within the Paragraph Style Options dialog box. Let's put that back

to 18 and we'll go ahead and make some larger leading here. If I have my Preview

on, I can see that all those changes are being made and I can visually make those

adjustments. In a future video, we'll show you how to base one style on another and

also how to tell InDesign to automatically switch to a new style for the next paragraph.

I hope you found this tip helpful. Be sure to check out InDesignSecrets.com

for thousands of InDesign articles and tutorials and to subscribe to our monthly

publication, InDesign Magazine. Thanks for learning with us.