One of the benefits of using InDesign features like parent pages, paragraph styles, and character styles is that whenever edits are made to a style or parent page, any changes made are applied wherever that parent or style is used. This makes it easy to make changes to the appearance of a publication and ensure everything looks consistent.
Let's see how changing a paragraph style will update the appearance of any text using the changed style. Afterwards, we'll make some changes to the parent pages and see how those changes are reflected on the document pages the parents are applied to.
Editing existing paragraph styles
In the newsletter we're working on, there are a few changes we can make to the Subheading paragraph style to help make the subheadings stand out more. First, we'll change the color of the text from black to Pet Pals Blue. Additionally, some of the subheadings are hyphenated awkwardly, like the subheading "Reasons for relinquishment", so we'll turn off hyphenation for the subheadings as part of the edits we're making to the Subheading style.
Let's go ahead and make these changes now. We can do that using the Paragraph Style Options dialog box. Before we start making these changes, we'll want to make sure nothing is selected in the document, as the paragraph style we want to edit may be applied to selected text as we open the Paragraph Style Options dialog box.
To deselect everything in the document, in the Menu bar,
Click Edit, Click Deselect All
NOTE: The Deselect All option will be grayed out if nothing in the document is currently selected.
To open the Paragraph Styles panel, in the Panel dock,
Click
To open the Paragraph Style Options dialog box for the Subheading style, in the Paragraph Styles panel,
Double-Click Subheading
To view the character color options, in the navigation on the left side of the Paragraph Style Options dialog box,
Click Character Color
To change the color of the text to Pet Pals Blue, in the list of swatches,
scroll until the swatch Pet Pals Blue is visible, Click Pet Pals Blue
To view the hyphenation options, in the navigation on the left side of the Paragraph Style Options dialog box,
Click Hyphenation
To turn off hyphenation, underneath the Hyphenation heading,
Click the checkbox next to Hyphenate to remove the checkmark
To accept the changes made to the paragraph style, in the bottom right corner of the dialog box,
Click
After making the changes, if we scroll through the newsletter, we'll now see that all the subheadings have turned blue and the awkward hyphenation has been removed, as shown in the following example from page 1 of the newsletter:
Now, let's make some changes to the parent pages in the document.
Editing parent pages
If desired, parent pages can be edited after they've been applied to document pages. Similar to what happens when changing paragraph styles, any changes made will be reflected on the document pages they've been applied to. Let's see this in action by making some changes to the parent pages used in the newsletter document.
Making changes to the A-Cover parent page
We'll start out by making some changes to the A-Cover parent page — specifically, we'll change the color of the newsletter's name to the shade of blue used in the Midwest Pet Pals logo, and add a paragraph rule between the newsletter's name and issue information to separate those two pieces of information a little better.
To open the Pages panel, in the Panel dock,
Click
To view the A-Cover parent page, in the top section of the Pages panel,
Double-Click
To open the Swatches panel, in the Panel dock,
Click
To activate the Type tool, in the Tools panel,
Click
To select the newsletter's name, with the Type tool active,
Triple-Click the text "Midwest Pet Pals Gazette"
To change the color of the selected text, in the Swatches panel,
Click the Pet Pals Blue swatch
Activate the Selection tool.
To insert the cursor into the text frame containing the issue information, with the Selection tool active,
Double-Click the frame containing the text "Volume 1, Issue, 1, date"
A blinking cursor should appear somewhere inside the frame at this point, and the active tool will switch to the Type tool.
To open the Paragraph Rules dialog box, on the far right side of the Control panel,
Click, Click Paragraph Rules…
Ensure that Rule Above is showing in the paragraph rule drop-down at the top of the Paragraph Rules dialog box.
To display a paragraph rule above the text, at the top of the Paragraph Rules dialog box,
Click the Rule On checkbox
To change the offset to 0.1875 inches and apply the changes, in the Offset field of the dialog box,
Press & Drag value, type: .1875 Enter key
The nameplate should now look like the following image:
Making changes to the B-Inside parent pages
Next, let's make some edits to the B-Inside parent pages. Specifically, we'll change the color of the text in the page headers to the same color we used for the newsletter name. Since the paragraph rules were originally set to be the same color as the text, once we change the text color, we'll need to change the paragraph rules to use the color black. After we make those changes, we'll save the file.
Open the Pages panel.
To move to the B-Inside parent pages, in the top section of the Pages panel,
Click
Ensure that the Type tool is the active tool.
Open the Swatches panel.
To select the text to work with, at the top of the left-hand page of the spread,
Triple-Click the text "Midwest Pet Pals Gazette"
To change the color of the selected text, in the Swatches panel,
Click Pet Pals Blue
Deselect the text.
Repeat steps c and d with the header at the top of the right page.
To open the Paragraph Rules dialog box, on the far right side of the Control panel,
Click, Click Paragraph Rules…
To switch to working with the rule below the text, if necessary, in the rule drop-down,
Click , Click Rule Below
To change the color of the paragraph rule, in the Color drop-down menu,
Click, Click [Black]
To accept the changes made to the paragraph rule, in the lower right corner of the dialog box,
Click
Repeat steps a-d for the header on the opposite page of the spread.
To save the file, on the keyboard, press:
Control key + S
Viewing the updated newsletter content
Let's look through the newsletter to see the changes we've made to its appearance. We'll need to reopen the Pages panel and switch to viewing the document pages to accomplish this.
Open the Pages panel.
To view page 1, in the lower half of the Pages panel,
Double-Click
Scroll through the rest of the document pages to see how the changes on the parent pages updated the document pages as well.
When looking at the document pages, we can see the changes made to the paragraph styles are reflected in the document's text. Changes to the parent pages are also visible on the document pages without us needing to reapply the parent pages.
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