Creating and using paragraph styles

Now that we've added text to the newsletter and formatted the headlines for the two articles we have, let's focus our attention on formatting the body text of the main article.

Up to this point, whenever we've applied formatting to text, we've done so by highlighting the text we want to format, then changing its appearance in either the Character panel, Paragraph panel, or Control panel. However, if we followed that process for applying formatting to every paragraph and subheading in the main article, it would be repetitive, time-consuming, and more prone to errors.

There's an easier way to apply formatting to large amounts of text, or the same formatting to a number of different pieces of text in a document — by using styles.

Understanding styles in InDesign

A style is a predefined bundle of text formatting attributes, including fonts, font size, alignment, line spacing, shading, and more. Using styles in a document helps us establish a consistent look for a document, and helps reduce errors in applying formatting.

There are two types of styles in InDesign: character styles and paragraph styles. Character styles are used on individual characters of text, and contain formatting attributes that focus on fonts, font sizes, text color, and other character-specific formatting. Paragraph styles can include paragraph-specific settings such as text alignment, indentation, line spacing, and others, as well as all of the character formatting attributes available to character styles. Using styles makes it easy to apply many different formatting attributes all at once to selected text.

We can see what character and paragraph styles are applied to the text where our cursor is located in a few locations. When the Type tool is active, the Control panel displays the character or paragraph style currently applied to the text — the type of style displayed depends on what formatting controls we're viewing on the Control panel. We can also see the currently applied style along with the full list of styles contained in a document by going to either the Character or Paragraph Style panels.

We'll be creating two paragraph styles for the main article of our newsletter: one for the body text and a second one for the subheadings. We'll first format the text using the Control panel, then save the formatting as a paragraph style and apply the paragraph style to the appropriate text in the newsletter.

Formatting the body text for the main article

Let's start out with formatting the body text of the newsletter's main article. We'll format the text first, then adjust the paragraph spacing and indent the first line of the paragraph.

The body text, when imported, was assigned InDesign's default serif font, Minion Pro. While this font is easily readable at small sizes, we want to make sure the newsletter uses the same serif font throughout, so we'll change the font from Minion Pro to Georgia to match the serif font used in the nameplate. We'll also adjust the size of the text so it's a little smaller and fits in the columns better.

We'll also work with a new formatting option to change the spacing between the lines of text to help bring the lines of text closer together: leading. Leading (pronounced like the metal, lead) refers to the vertical space between individual lines of text. InDesign automatically sets the leading to 120% of the font size, but we can change this value manually if desired to add or remove space between lines of text. Sometimes a smaller leading value is more appropriate for narrow columns of text. A desirable leading value is one that isn't so narrow that it's hard for the eye to track the text to the following line, but not so large that the eye has to jump too far between lines of text. We'll reduce the leading for our paragraphs to remove some of the extra space between lines of text and increase readability.

Let's select and format the second paragraph of text in the main article.

Applying first line indents and paragraph spacing

A well-designed body of text includes some clear indicators of the beginning and end of paragraphs. This can include indenting the first line of text and adding space before or after a paragraph. Visually separating paragraphs makes it so readers can easily work through the content in conceptual chunks.

When adjusting the space before or after a paragraph as part of a paragraph style, it's important to remember that whatever spacing we specify for the selected paragraph will be applied to all paragraphs that use this style. What that means for us is that we need to decide which side of the paragraph to apply extra spacing to — before or after. If we add space to both sides and apply the setting to all paragraphs, we'll end up with too much space between paragraphs.

For the Midwest Pet Pals Gazette, to help make it more obvious where each paragraph starts and ends in the main story, we'll apply both a first line indent and extra space after the paragraph we're formatting. We can do this using either the Control panel or the Paragraph panel - we'll use the Control panel for now.

Now that the paragraph is styled the way we want, let's create a paragraph style based on this formatting.

Creating a paragraph style based on existing formatting

At this point, we're ready to create a paragraph style that we'll use to style the body text of the newsletter. The style we make will include all the formatting we applied to the selected text, including both character and paragraph formatting. We'll use the Paragraph Styles panel to accomplish this.

The Paragraph Styles panel contains a list of all the styles in a document:

Currently, our Paragraph Styles panel contains two styles: [Basic Paragraph] and Normal. [Basic Paragraph] is the default styling for the text in the document — we won't make changes to this style today. (You may have noticed the plus sign next to [Basic Paragraph] - we'll discuss what the plus sign means in a little bit.) The Normal style was imported along with the text for the sidebar on the front page from the Word document containing the article's text.

Let's create the paragraph style for the body text. Once created, we'll apply the style to all of the text in the main article.

Creating a paragraph style for the subheadings

Now that the text of the main article has been reformatted, we can see that there are some single lines of text between some paragraphs, as shown in the following screenshot of some of the text in the third column on the front page:

The lines "Adoption to the rescue!" and "The adoption process" are examples of subheadings. Subheadings help organize a story, and to help make the subheadings in the main article stand out more from the surrounding text, we'll format them differently than the body text.

Let's format one of the subheadings in the document, then save its formatting as another paragraph style. We'll remove the first line indent, change the font to Verdana Bold, and increase the font size. We'll also add space above the subheadings, to make it more obvious that the subheading signals a change in subject.

Now that the subheading has been styled, if we look at the Paragraph Styles panel, we'll notice that something's happened to the Body Text style:

The plus sign next to the style's name indicates that we've changed some of the styling for the selected text — this is referred to as a style override. There are a few things we can do here: we can ignore the override, define it as a new style, or reject the changes made and revert to the original paragraph style.

Since we made these changes on purpose in order to create a new style, we'll create a new paragraph style using the new formatting. We'll use a different process for creating the new style this time — instead of going through the Paragraph Styles panel menu, we'll use the Create new style button located at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. We'll name this new style Subheading.

We'll also change a setting in the Paragraph Style Options dialog box we haven't used before: the Next Style setting. When we choose a style in the Next Style drop-down, it means the next paragraph after the one using the current style will use the style we select. This will be especially helpful if we type text directly into the document. For example. if we start a new line of text and change the style to Subheading, then type the subheading's text and press the Enter key to move to the next line, the paragraph style for the new paragraph will automatically change to the Body Text style without us needing to do anything.

Let's create the Subheading paragraph style now.

Applying the Subheading style to subheadings in the main story

Now that we have the Subheading style created, we can apply it to the other subheadings in the article. After that, we'll save the document.

At this point, the newsletter should look similar to the images in the following accordion folds: