Italics are used for emphasis, to identify unfamiliar words, in titles of books, films, plays, ships, and numerous other places, to denote character thoughts in narratives, and for several other uses in English and other written languages. Thanks to Aldus Manutius, writers, designers, and printers alike have become prolificly enamored of italic type. Bold we use less often in the middle of a paragraph, but it has its uses.
Clearing local text formatting overrides wipes away all the emphasis, the identification of unfamiliar words, correct citation of book, film, play, and ship titles, and so on, rendering it all as normal, undifferentiated text. (This is a bad thing.) This consequence is easy to miss, especially if you happen to clear overrides by force applying a paragraph style while zoomed out, selecting a multi-page story and using the Clear Overrides command on the Paragraph Styles palette flyout menu, or by using Find/Change to replace or re-apply a paragraph style. You will not, however, lose italics, bold, underline, strikethrough, or other character-level formatting if you’ve applied that formatting with a character style(sheet).
Protecting Your Formatting
Instead of hitting CMD+SHIFT+I/CTRL+SHIFT+I for italics or CMD+SHIFT+B/CTRL+SHIFT+B for bold while typing, first create a character style on the Character Styles palette. Build an Italic style that contains no other option than a Font Style setting of “italics”. Similarly, if you use embolded words or phrases within paragraph text, make a Bold character style. Leave out the Font Family, Size, Color, and all other options. Those will derive from the paragraph style in effect on the particular text, and thus the Italic or Bold character styles can be applied to any text, anywhere in the document, and belonging to any paragraph style, changing only a single attribute. Applying the Italic character style to Times New Roman text will beget Times New Roman Italic; applying it to Calibri will produce Calibri Italic. If the particular type family doesn’t have an italic or bold font, InDesign will apply the character style but highlight the text in pink to indicate a missing font; you can then spot fix where needed. (Missing font highlighting is enabled by default, but can be turned off on the Composition tab of InDesign’s Preferences.) Most importantly, when a font style has been applied via a character style, clearing overrides will not remove the character style.
I recommend that all InCopy and InDesign users create character styles for italic, bold, bold-italic, regular, and underline (using the underline settings most common to each particular workflow), and apply such formatting from the character styles rather than on the fly from keyboard shortcuts or the Character palette. In fact, make those styles part of InCopy’s and InDesign’s defaults. Either create the character styles with all documents closed, or create them in one document and then, with all documents closed, load them into the application from the file. On the Character Styles flyout palette menu is the Load Character Styles command, which enables you select a document and suck only its character styles into InDesign or InCopy. Adding them with all documents closed makes them a part of, and always available to, new documents you create thereafter.
If you have a document that already includes local formatting not attached to a character style, bring those local instances under the protection of the character style. Using Edit > Find/Change, leave both the Find What and Change To fields empty, but set their formatting options to search for all instances of the Font Style Italic, and to replace those with the character style Italic. Set the Search dropdown to Document or All Documents, which will search across all open documents, and click Change All. All instances of that Font Style will now be protected from any clear overrides commands. Do the same for bold, underline, and so forth.
When you do want to eliminate italics or another local styling option, use the Regular character style whose only attribute is a Font Style set to Regular and thus not italic, not bold, not bold-italic, and so on. Don’t use the [None] character style as it will leave the local formatting, just break the link to the character style.
Adobe Should Have Done This
Personally, I feel Adobe should have done this work themselves. InCopy and InDesign should out-of-the-box include such character styles as Italic, Bold, Regular, and the others. Moreover, instead of allowing the all too easily wiped away local override, every time the user hits common keyboard shortcuts like CMD+SHIFT+I/CTRL+SHIFT+I or CMD+SHIFT+B/CTRL+SHIFT+B, InDesign and InCopy should automatically apply the corresponding character style. Make the old and safe ways a preference setting, but default to safety. Many an accident would be avoided with that simple behavior, particularly with designers who frequently clear overrides–in workflows where content comes from a variety of sources and among workgroups where multiple creatives and editors are prone to changing local text formatting.
In fact, I call upon both Adobe and Quark to add to their respective applications’ text engines this extra layer of document safety and user convenience. Or, at the very least, enable us to re-assign CMD+SHIFT keyboard shortcuts to character styles.
While we’re waiting for the software makers to alleviate this situation, use character styles. Their use is neither as elegant or familiar as a decades-old keyboard shortcut, but they offer protection from accidental removal you can’t get otherwise.
While I think your advice is very good, I would go one step further and make the naming of the character style less specific.
Usually I call my italic & bold character styles emphasis and strong respectively. The main reason for doing it that way? What if you (or your boss/supervisor) decide later in the workflow that you want to emphasize passages of text by color and not font-style?
I know you could easily change the character style at that point but I just think it’s a good workflow habit, especially when working with lots of other folks. It also makes easier for those of us with one foot in the print world and the other on the web.
On another point, I strongly disagree that Adobe or Quark should provide default character styles. I hate the Basic Paragraph style enough as it is, plus if I want defaults character styles I can create when no documents are open.
Thanks for the feedback, Rene.
Clearly, I’m like you, one of those with a foot in each of the print publishing and Web publishing worlds. I have to say, though, I’ve never liked the EM (for emphasis) and STRONG tags, and I’ve been working in HTML since before they were introduced. Renaming Italics to Emphasis is to limit a 500 year old innovation only one of its uses in printed communications.
Italics, as I mentioned in my article, are used in written English to correctly set the name of self-contained titles like book, film, television show, play, magazine, and Website titles. They’re also used to identify certain types of proper names such as ship, boat, and other vessel names. There is no inherent emphasis in a book title or a ship’s name, so in XHTML, where every tag is part of a logical description of the content structure, why would you identify a a book title or a ship’s name has having EMphasis? We’re not allowed to use <I> for italics any longer, so if you want to type a book title but with no particular emphasis of voice, which tag should you use? Should you wrap it in a SPAN and give it a class named ProperTitle or NonEmphasisItalics? The W3C requires that all mentions of such titles or names be wrapped in EMphasis HTML tags–if one wishes to adhere to proper grammar, that is. Clearly, the W3C didn’t think through its decision to replace <I> with <EM>. The replacement of <B> with <STRONG> was similarly myopic.
I could go on at length about why EMphasis and STRONG are obviously ignorant and arrogant choices on the part of the learned members of the W3C, but in this publication, focussed on print applications, workflows, and professionals, such a conversation would be far out of place. Maybe we should continue it on Designorati sometime.
I see your point, but I hope you can also see mine. The problem of common formatting like italics and bold being too easily erased with a quick ALT-click on the Paragraph Styles panel may be miniscule or enormous, depending on the individual creative and her work. I believe the software makers should provide some type of solution, and I offered two suggestions. Perhaps the best way is something I haven’t thought of. Regardless of the proffered ideas, the way the software works creates a problem that can and should be solved, by somebody, somehow, soon.
Adobe and Quark have not provided a solution yet, which makes more work for users. Granted, each time isn’t much work, but the act of highlighting text and assigning a character style–even with Quick Apply–is a significant distraction from the writing. Any time you have to break your concentration away from creating and styling content to think about the software, the software maker has failed to do its job.
Hey Pariah, great article. One problem I see with creating default character styles for bold and italic etc. is they’re prone to fall apart depending on the typeface. For example, applying the Bold char style to text styled with anything in the numbered Univers family (45 Light, 55 Roman, etc.) will result in the dreaded pinking, applying the Italic char style to fonts with two or more weights (light, regular, heavy) often results in the wrong Italic being applied, and so on.
Still, if it falls apart using Character Styles, it would have fallen apart using the keyboard shortcuts too. (With the exception of Helvetica … ID knows that applying Italic to Helvetia means you want Helvetica Oblique. There may be others.) I would recommend that the designers (not the editors using InCopy) create specific character styles for applying the correct bold/heavy etc. as appropriate to the typefaces used in the body text.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a script that would automatically convert local formatting to these sorts of Character Styles? I found this long thread that contains a number of them, if you don’t mind cutting/pasting text into a text file and saving it as a script:
Pariah one other thing. I was arguing (friendly argument) with a web design freelancer of mine that bold and italic were deprecated by the w3c long ago; replaced with strong and em. He didn’t believe me … sigh … but I could not for the life of me find the page on the w3c.org site that definitively said this. Do you have a URL?
thanks,
the inimitable and sagacious Anne-Marie ;-)
hmmm my post lost the link to the thread. Let me try this little “link” button
here
okay I give up. Here it is as plain text, remove the space after the colon and the return after cgi-bin/
http: //www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/
webx?128@@.3bc1cee8
Can’t resist one more try of the link button!
Thread about scripts
Very interesting read. My only concern with wanting manual bolds and italics is for secondary use in XML. At our company, we use Quark (soon to transition to InDesign). When things are manually bolded and italicized, in XML those characters show up as bold or italic and can be manipulated for our purposes. Our tests so far in InDesign no longer show us when the bold/italics are there, because the font information is stripped out. Is there a fix for that? Or some way InDesign can tell us? We’re using character-level styles as you suggest, but I’m having problems getting an italic character style to stick, since some of our fonts use “Oblique”. I’m using InDesign CS2. Your site is always very helpful and informative, so thanks for letting me vent!
I don’t know if anyone can help me on this, but I have a client who has word documents with embeded html code which determines if a word is bold or italic. They want to import that text into Quark WITHOUT loosing the text format. I have never heard of this and am pretty sure that whenever you import into quark, it strips the font and assigns it the default. Please help me if anyone knows how this is supposed to. They are on pc.