InDesign Character Styles

Use Character Style Sheets to Save Time Use Character Style Sheets to Save Time

Illustration by J. Bear; licensed to About.comCharacter Style Sheets can be real time savers for designers especially in the creation of long or multi-page documents. Character Style Sheets are simply recorded format that you can then use in your design at will.

Consistency is one of the principles that designers must follow. Character Sheets help the designer so he doesn't have to apply manually the same type of formatting over and over again throughout the document.

Let me give you an example. You are designing a magazine promoting a certain item. You want to have all of your titles with a certain font, a certain size and a certain colour. You can record all of this information in a Character Style Sheet and then apply them to each title with a click.

Now, let's say that you decide that the titles are too small and they all have to be made 4 points bigger. Well, you just go to your Character Sheet and modify the size of your font there and all of the parts of text with that Character Style Sheet will change in one go. The same principle works in using Paragraph Style Sheets, but I will take those up in another article. Isn't that useful? So how do you set these Character Sheets in InDesign? This tutorial takes you step-by-step through the basic process. This page Use Character Style Sheets to Save Time Create a New Character Style Set the Character Style Options Change the Character Style Options for Quick Changes Throughout

View the original article here