Hi there! In this tutorial you’re going to
learn about character styles in InDesign, so let’s get started.
The reason why I did paragraph styles first,
is so that you’d not have to do much with character styles.
Let’s do a little bit of theory. You see, on the left are some of the major features of the
paragraph styles, and on the right are the major ones of the character styles. If you look closely,
you’ll find that the paragraph styles, cover almost all the features, there are,
in character styles. However, there is something that cannot be done, using the paragraph styles,
and is possible, only with character styles, so to learn that, let’s get into action.
Let’s go to page 2. I’m going to drag the paragraph styles panel out,
and then I’m going to go to window, and then styles, and select character styles.
Let’s delete the existing character style in there, because we’ll make a fresh one.
I’m going to make a text box, and right-click, to fill it with some placeholder text,
and then delete some text, to shorten the paragraph. Let’s zoom in, and let’s say I
want to style this word ‘parum’, so I’m going to select it, and I’m going to show you what happens,
when I apply the paragraph style to it. I’m going to click the small plus button,
to create a new paragraph style, double-click, and go to basic character formats. From here, I’m
going to change the font to ‘Museo Sans’, and font style to ‘700’, and update the size to 24 points.
Now you see, what happened. As I was making changes to the style, it was affecting not just
that one word, I expected it to affect, but the entire paragraph. Let’s come out of the paragraph
style, after hitting okay. Let’s do a Command Z on a Mac, or Ctrl Z on a PC, to undo the last action.
With the word still selected, I’m going to add a new character style now. Double-click
the new style, and go to basic character formats tab. Update the font to ‘Museo Sans Condensed’.
Change the font style to 900, and size to 30 points, and hit okay. This time,
only the highlighted word inherited the style, and not the paragraph,
and that’s exactly what we wanted. This holds good, not just for a word, but even a letter,
so let’s select the letter ‘U’ here, and create a new character style. Go to the basic character
formats tab. Change the font to ‘Abril Titling’, and you see all our actions are restricted to
only that one letter we selected, before creating this character style. These are some of the other
options, you can set, using character styles, whereas, if you go to the paragraph styles, you
can find a wide variety of options, to chose from. I hope you’ve understood the basic difference
between the paragraph styles, and the character styles, so I expect you to use them wisely.
Alright guys, that concludes our session. In the next lesson,
we’re going to learn a very interesting style, called ‘GREP’ style, so see you in a bit.