MARCH 18, 2004
Nested Styles in Adobe InDesign CS
Simplifying complex character style combinations
David Nagel
Page 4 of 4

So what I have now is a paragraph that uses the Numeral style for the first two characters; the Entry Head style through the first sentence (starting off where the Numeral style leaves off) followed by the Body style after the first sentence (defined by a period).

The other problem is that the paragraph I selected to define this paragraph style didn't include my End Bug style, so I need to add that manually. In order to do this, I need to click the "New Nested Style" button, and then select "End Bug" from the list of defined styles.

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And then I set it to be applied "up to 1 Forced Line Break."



Finally, I need to place this at the end of the list of nested styles because the nested style list applies your styles in order. And I need to change the Body style to be applied only up to the first tab it encounters.

Now I can just select my entire story and apply the new formatting, and all of the paragraphs I've selected will be formatted properly. Also, as long as I'm within a region defined with a paragraph style, I can add new entries with the style applied on the fly, as in the example below.



The same holds true for any text I paste into the area.

One final note on nested character styles. Obviously my particular sidebar designed worked just fine with the nested styles because I had easily identifiable regions of text for differentiating between styles. My Numeral style, however, would not have worked well had my list gotten up into multiple digits because my custom tracking was designed for a space character, which was designed to be the second character in my entries.



Also, if I used, say, a colon rather than a period at the end of an entry header, my style couldn't be defined for a single sentence. In other words, you're limited to only a small number of fixed characters that can be referenced when defining nested styles.

However, there is a way to overcome this. Whenever you know there's going to be a shift in character style, you can insert a special character called "End Nested Character Here," which is accessible through the Type menu. (You can also define a keyboard shortcut for this character.)



This being the case, you can insert on of these characters at each style break, then go back and define your nested style up to this special character, rather than to a period, digit or other variable.



Simple enough. If you have any further questions, be sure to visit me in the Adobe InDesign forum here.
Contact the author: Dave Nagel is the editor and producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of several World Wide User Groups, including Synthetik Studio Artist, Adobe Photoshop, Apple DVD Studio Pro, Mac OS, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Corel Painter, Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; and executive producer of the Digital Media Net family of publications. You can reach him at dnagel@digitalmedianet.com.


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