Nested Styles: An InDesign Secret Weapon

Now, To Review...

In the begin­ning I not­ed that this was a “nuts and bolts” sort of thing. By now, you, the read­er, are prob­a­bly feel­ing like you’ve been repair­ing a Diesel engine with a tooth­pick. But con­sid­er that we’ve cre­at­ed a unique para­graph style with the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter styles con­tained within:

• Event Headline, styling the head­line of the entry
• Event Rating, styling the rat­ing infor­ma­tion uniquely
• Event Email Contact, which high­lights the name and email con­tact of the out­ings leader. 

In order to apply all this for­mat­ting with one deft motion, we’ve cre­at­ed a para­graph style (Event Listing), nest­ing those styles in thusly:

1. Apply Event Headline from the begin­ning to the first forced line break;
2. Apply Event Rating from that point over the 1st word only from there;
3. Apply no spe­cial char­ac­ter styling from the end of that word through the first colon we come to;
4. Apply Event Email Contact from there up to but not includ­ing the first dig­it we come to;
5. Apply no spe­cial char­ac­ter styling from that dig­it out to the next colon;
6. And, final­ly, apply the Event Email Contact style again to the actu­al email address, end­ing the paragraph.

All that styling will then be applied auto­mat­i­cal­ly when­ev­er any para­graph is styled with the Event Listing para­graph style. No addi­tion­al moves are necessary.

The true pow­er in nest­ed styles is that each style will be ruth­less­ly and con­sis­tent­ly reap­plied instant­ly with a sin­gle click every time one uses the para­graph style. On lay­out that involves com­plex for­mat­ting over large ranges of text, the sav­ings in effort and time down the line as opposed to man­u­al­ly apply­ing char­ac­ter styles (even with InDesign’s won­der­ful “Quick Apply” fea­ture) should be obvious.

No tool is, of course, per­fect; the most effec­tive use of nest­ed styles comes from a work­flow which under­stands what its type require­ments are at the basic lev­el. But for those who look for for­mat­ting long stan­dard lists of things, or even if what is want­ed is a con­sis­tent approach to small things, nest­ed style is InDesign’s secret pow­er tool.

Go ahead, get your hands dirty. Dive in.

Suggestions For Further Study

Create a few sam­ple para­graphs or clip some para­graphs from oth­er InDesign files to give a sense of real­ism and go to town on them. Give them a basic para­graph for­mat, build char­ac­ter for­mats then com­pile these into a new para­graph style con­tain­ing nest­ed styles. 

More detailed infor­ma­tion on the top­ics not cov­ered in this how-to can be had quick­ly to hand in InDesign help, which has a good list defin­ing the var­i­ous range mark­er char­ac­ters available

In par­tic­u­lar, play with the many vari­a­tions of ter­mi­nat­ing char­ac­ters. Particularly note the “End Nested Style Character” item. This char­ac­ter, avail­able from the Type>Insert Special Character menu, can be dropped in the para­graph wher­ev­er desired and can be used as a range-ending mark regard­less of what else is going on in the paragraph.