User Guide

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Chapter 7: Styles
Creating, editing, and deleting styles
About styles
A character style is a collection of character formatting attributes that can be applied to text in a single step. A
paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes, and can be applied to a selected
paragraph or range of paragraphs. Paragraph styles and character styles are found on separate palettes.
When you change the formatting of a style, all text to which the style has been applied will be updated with the new
format.
You can create, edit, and delete styles in stand-alone InCopy documents or in InCopy content that is linked to an
InDesign document. When the contents are updated in InDesign, new styles are added to the InDesign document,
but any style modifications made in InCopy will be overridden by the InDesign style. For linked content, it is usually
best to manage your styles in InDesign.
By default, each new document contains a [Basic Paragraph] style that is applied to text you type. You can edit this
style, but you can’t rename or delete it. You can rename and delete styles that you create. You can also specify a
different default style to apply to text.
See also
“About the Character palette” on page 208
“About the Paragraph palette” on page 214
To use the Styles palettes
• To display the Paragraph Styles palette, choose Type > Paragraph Styles, or click the Paragraph Styles tab, which
appears by default on the right side of the application window.
• To display the Character Styles palette, choose Type > Character Styles, or click the Character Styles tab on the
right side of the application window.
When you select text or position the insertion point, any style that has been applied to that text is highlighted in the
Styles palette. If you select a range of text that contains multiple styles, no style is highlighted in the Styles palette. If
you select a range of text to which multiple paragraph styles are applied, the bottom left corner of the Paragraph Styles
palette displays “(Mixed).”
To create styles
If you are working with a stand-alone story, you can define, modify, and apply both character and paragraph styles
in InCopy. If the styles you want already exist in another InCopy or InDesign document, you can import those styles
for use in your current document. You can also import styles from word-processing applications.
1 If you want to base a new style on the formatting of existing text, select that text or place the insertion point in it.
2 Choose New Paragraph Style from the Paragraph Styles palette menu, or choose New Character Style from the
Character Styles palette menu.