OK, this is pretty obscure. But perhaps it will be helpful for someone.
You may be aware of the long-standing issue in InDesign where the numeral at the start of auto-numbered paragraphs picks up the formatting of the first character of the paragraph. Anne-Marie wrote a nice post about this here.
But there’s more to this story. Create a couple of paragraphs, format them with a typeface that has only a regular and bold weight, such as Times. Make sure that no paragraph style is applied, not even the [Basic Paragraph] style. Then create two character styles, named Bold and Italic, that include just the Bold and Italic attributes, and no other formatting.
Now, apply bold or italic local formatting to the first word of your paragraphs, and you’ll see that the number becomes bold or italic also. Undo this, and apply your bold or italic character styles to the first words of the paragraphs, and you’ll see that the numeral doesn’t take on the bold or italic formatting. In the example below, paragraphs 1 and 3 have local formatting, and 2 and 4 are formatted with character styles.
So, it seems that a good workaround would be to always use character styles if you need to apply formatting to the first characters of a numbered paragraph. But, alas, it isn’t so simple.
Create another example paragraph, and format this one with a typeface that has extended weights and styles, such as Myriad Pro Light or Helvetica LT Std Light. When you apply bold or italic direct formatting to the first word in this example, the same thing will happen…the numeral will pick up this local formatting. But here is where it gets weird. Apply the bold or italic character style that you’ve created to the first word. Notice anything odd? In the case of Helvetica LT Std Light, applying the bold character style to the first word makes the numeral heavier, but not bold turning it into Helvetica LT Std Roman. Even more unexpected, applying the italic character style also turns the numeral into Helvetica LT Std Roman. I’d expect that other typeface combinations would also give some unexpected results. In the example below, paragraphs 1 and 3 contain local formatting in the first words, and 2 and 4 are formatted with character styles.
Granted, this is very obscure. But it happened to a client of mine, causing them to scratch their collective heads. So it could happen to you.
The moral of the story? Always use paragraph AND character styles. In this case, if paragraph styles are used for the text, and the first word exceptions are formatted with character styles, everything works as expected!
For a couple of other workarounds, see Anne Marie’s post.
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on November 18, 2010
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