Nested Styles: An InDesign Secret Weapon

In lay­out, it goes with­out say­ing how impor­tant styles are; with­out them, lay­out artists would be reduced to for­mat­ting text para­graph by para­graph and char­ac­ter by char­ac­ter. The idea is almost enough to make one want to go back to hand type­set­ting, or even break­ing rocks on the chain gang. But ever since the advent of modern-day elec­tron­ic lay­out, the immense pow­er of soft­ware have con­tin­ued to deliv­er design mus­cles only dreamt of even a decade ago. Every professional-grade tool (and even some home-user tools) pro­vide para­graph and character-level styling; enabling instant styling of body text, cap­tions, kick­er para­graphs, and oth­er things. 

But think about remov­ing one more lev­el of drudgery; think about apply­ing a para­graph style and auto­mat­i­cal­ly hav­ing char­ac­ter styles applied to des­ig­nat­ed parts of the para­graph. Only InDesign gives you this lev­el of con­trol in nest­ed styles.

What exactly is a nested style?

When we say nest­ed we mean in the man­ner of putting things in oth­er things; nest­ed graph­ics are graph­ics inside of oth­er graph­ics, so a nest­ed style is a style with­in a style, an inner style that is applied when­ev­er the out­er style is called.

To be more pre­cise, a nest­ed style is a char­ac­ter style con­tained inside a para­graph style. Controls with­in the appli­ca­tion allow the user to define a range over which the nest­ed style applies, and a num­ber of nest­ed styles can be sequenced with­in the para­graph style itself, spec­i­fy­ing ranges as one goes.

The Drop Caps and Nested Styles pane of the Paragraph Style Options dia­log. Note the Nested styles list in the right hand side.

To access and enable nest­ed styles one goes to the Nested Styles and Drop Caps pane of the Paragraph Style Option dia­log of the para­graph style which one wants to nest styles with­in (double-click on the para­graph style to bring that dia­log up, or sim­ply cre­ate a new para­graph style from the fly­out menu on the Paragraph Styles palette). The low­er half of the pane shows the Nested Styles list. Nested Styles are defined by click­ing the New Nested Style but­ton, cleared out (if nec­es­sary) by the Delete but­ton, and can be shuf­fled about by click­ing on a style then click­ing on either arrow button.

Now we know where it is, but what goes in there? Let’s back up a step. Nested styles are char­ac­ter styles with­in para­graph styles; let’s set up some of each.

The Situation

We will take, as a for-example, a pub­li­ca­tion that wants to have a page of nature out­ings. One could sim­ply list out the events one by one in a stan­dard, read­able font (such as Times New Roman), but this both­ers us design­ers; unless there’s a good rea­son, we don’t want that “I did­n’t design” it that default styles give us. Moreover, we may have graph­ic stan­dards we need to com­ply with. So, let’s take it apart just a little.

Up on top is what we have. Below that is what we want. We can set up char­ac­ter and para­graph styles to give each para­graph the look we want, put the para­graph styles on all the body text, and then go through and pick out the indi­vid­ual details we want. 

Doing that bit-by-bit with char­ac­ter styles is bet­ter than noth­ing but InDesign gives us even more pow­er. With nest­ed styles we can spec­i­fy the head­line as Myriad Pro Condensed Semibold; the event rat­ing as the ital­ic semi­bold, and the out­ing leader name and email address so that they jump out for quick referral.