Nested Styles: An InDesign Secret Weapon

Marking the boundaries

In the edi­to­r­i­al process, we’ve defined that we want the event name sep­a­rat­ed from the descrip­tion by a forced line break, the event rat­ing with­out any spaces, so we can treat it as a word, The leader name and email address as always being the last two items in the para­graph and always pre­ced­ed by a colon. These are basic land­marks we can give our nest­ed styles to guide by.

After much exper­i­ment­ing we’ve decid­ed that the best for­mats for our event list­ing are as follows:

• The event head­line, which is always between the very start of the para­graph and that first force line break, will always be 10/12 Myriad Pro Semibold Condensed.
• The event rat­ing (a quick descrip­tion of the dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el of the out­ing) is the very next string of char­ac­ters after that, and will always be 9/10.8 Myriad Pro Semibold Condensed Italic (we left the lead­ing on auto here to keep things simple).
• Everything else is going to have no spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter styling until we get to the event lead­er’s name, and email address, which are always going to be 9/10.8 Myriad Pro Bold Condensed Italic, which also clos­es out the paragraph.

Also, we’ve decid­ed our over­all para­graph style is going to be 9/10.8 Myriad Pro Condensed.

So now we know what we want. How do we get it?

Doing the sequence

The best approach to using nest­ed styles in your lay­out is a four-step process:

1. Define your Paragraph Style
2. Define or decide on the Character Styles you’ll be nest­ing in the Paragraph Style.
3. Identify the bound­aries of the nest­ed styles.
4. Assemble the nest­ed styles in order. 

To car­ry out the first step, for­mat the para­graph as 9/auto Myriad Pro Condensed, then cre­ate a new Paragraph Style based on that for­mat­ting called “Event Listing”.

Now, step 2. We don’t have the indi­vid­ual styles defined yet, so we’ll have to cre­ate them; we style the text appro­pri­ate­ly and cre­ate three Character Styles from them: “Event Headline”, “Event Rating”, and “Event Email Contact” (we’ll make that last one do double-duty on the name and the email).

Step three is per­formed by not­ing the appro­pri­ate points in the type. Event Headline will style the text from the start of the ‘graph to the forced line break; Event Rating will style the text string imme­di­ate­ly after, there will be no char­ac­ter styling from there to the lead­er’s name or between that and the email address; both those bits of infor­ma­tion, how­ev­er will be styled similarly.

At last we get to step four, where the rub­ber, as they say, meets the road.

Piecing it together

Defining a nest­ed style means you’ll start look­ing at para­graphs in some­thing of a new way. We’ll look at our first def­i­n­i­tion in detail.

With no nest­ed styles defined, we see this:

So to start things off, we click “New Nested Style” and get this:

We see that the dis­play has changed: a line has been gen­er­at­ed in the win­dow with four columns, and the first one has been turned into a drop-down list which, in the first posi­tion, is char­ac­ter styles avail­able. This is why we con­struct­ed the char­ac­ter styles before we got to this point; now they are avail­able. Since we’re styling the event head­line, we choose the Event Headline style.

Clicking on the first drop-down in the nest­ed style dia­log reveals the list of avail­able styles. We are about to choose “Event Headline”

Now click the next col­umn, the one that has the word “through”. This becomes a drop-down offer­ing either “through” or “up to”. The next two columns will define the end of the range (which we will spec­i­fy in the fourth col­umn) and we can either make it inclu­sive (through) or exclu­sive (up to). This first style range will include only the next forced line break char­ac­ter, so we choose “through”.