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All InDesign training courses should include coverage of the use of styles to improve workflow and maintain consistency within a document and across several documents. Most computer users have some familiarity with what styles are: named formats which can be applied to your text as an alternative to manually applying each formatting attribute individually. Even users new to InDesign will probably have encountered styles in Microsoft Word: “Heading 1″, “Heading2″, “Normal”, etc. However, InDesign’s use of styles is much more sophisticated and we always ensure, when we run InDesign training courses in London, that we emphasise their importance.

The obvious benefits of using styles are, firstly, consistency: the same formats are applied each time without variations accidentally creeping in. Secondly, speed: if a heading needs six formatting attributes applied then, if you do not use a style, you will have to apply each attribute manually. If you use a style, you can apply the necessary formats with one click or one keystroke. A third benefit is the ability to update and modify the look of your text simply by modifying the definition of your style(s).

One less salient benefit of using styles in InDesign is document scalability. Styles play a key role in some of InDesign’s advanced features and documents with no styles cannot benefit from these features. For example, a key part of creating layouts driven by XML is the mapping of XML tags to the styles within a document.

A second example is the creation of tables of contents. InDesign creates tables of contents based on the use of styles. In designing the table of contents, one specifies which styles are to be included. When the table of contents is generated, InDesign finds each piece of text in that style and places the appropriate page number next to it.

In reality, the table of contents feature is more multi-purpose than the name suggests since it can be used to produce a listing of any elements within a document provided a particular style has been used consistently. For example, if all images in a document have a caption formatted with a particular style, the table of contents facility can be used to generate a list of images.

A third example of advanced applications of styles is when working with InDesign books; a features which enables several InDesign documents to be treated as one entity for such operations as preflighting, creating PDFs and the generation of tables of contents. Separate users can work on each document within the book but the styles used within all documents can be streamlined by a process known as synchronisation.

Because of their importance, we cover styles both on our intro to InDesign training courses and on or advanced InDesign classes. On our advanced training courses, we explain the use of things like nested styles whereby you can include a character style within a paragraph style. The character style is then automatically applied to certain characters within the paragraph; for example, every character up to the first occurrence of an em dash.

Tags: Software

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