Nested Styles: An InDesign Secret Weapon

The next two columns work togeth­er to define the end of the range over which the nest­ed style will apply. The num­ber, which clicked on, becomes an input box in which any oth­er num­ber can be typed. We type a “1” here. Clicking on the next col­umn (which con­tains “Words” at this point) we get an input box/drop-down com­bi­na­tion. We could type a char­ac­ter (or char­ac­ters) to define the end but what we’ve done here is to choose “Forced Line Break” from the dropdown.

The first nest­ed style, com­plete­ly defined: from the begin­ning of the para­graph, apply the Event Headline style up to and includ­ing the first forced line break.

After this, the first nest­ed style is defined: In this para­graph, apply the Event Headline style from the begin­ning (because that’s where nest­ed styles begin apply­ing) through the first Forced Line Break character.

Using the same process, we define the next char­ac­ter string as Event Rating by spec­i­fy­ing in “through 1 Words”; it will apply to the next word (as defined by the next space-nested styles don’t attempt to make sense of the actu­al word) only.

The rest of the para­graph up to the lead­er’s name will have no styling, and we spec­i­fy this so that we can tag those styles on after. We do this by spec­i­fy­ing the next nest­ed style as “[None]”, “through” and “1”, and instead of pick­ing a spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter from the drop-down, type a colon in the input box.

Nested Styles with the first three spec­i­fied. After the Event Headline, Event Rating cov­ers the next text string up to the next space (through 1 Words) and there is no spe­cial styling applied to the para­graph until the next thime a colon comes up ([None] through 1 :)

Styling the name and email address is just a lit­tle more com­plex, but not much. We’ll be using the Event Email Contact style for both name and email We could style the name as “through 2 words”, but not every­one uses two-word names (Just ask Prince [is that what he’s call­ing him­self these days?]). The choic­es in the drop-down allow many ways to spec­i­fy this; in this case we choose “up to 1 Digits”, which will apply up to but not includ­ing the phone num­ber (which we can depend on because we’ve stan­dard­ized the phone to come always after the name). Whatever text that hap­pens between the first colon and the first dig­it of the phone num­ber will now be bold­faced and ital­ic. To fin­ish out the sequence (at long last) spec­i­fy [None] as the style “through 1 :”, which brings us to the email address, then spec­i­fy “Event Email Contact through 1 Words” to bring the email address on board (remem­ber, words are defined by spaces).

Last three nest­ed styles defined. These take up where the last of the first three in the pre­vi­ous illus­tra­tion left off.

With that last style, we’ve come to the end of the para­graph. We’ve had to go to the end of the para­graph because we’ve had two bits at the end to style, but if our needs were less demand­ing, say, if we only want­ed to style the head­line and event rat­ing, we could have just left it off at two.