Creating Percentage-based Styles

Normally when you’re setting your paragraph styles you must specify a font size. If you want to shrink your entire layout by 20%, you have to go to each style and manually alter it. I don’t know about you, but that seems like way more work that it needs to be.

Setting your percentage based styles

1. Create a base style (ex- 10pt Helvetica – named 100%).

2. Create a new paragraph style based on the 100% style, but under “Advanced Character Formats” change both the horizontal and vertical scale. This makes the style a specific percentage larger or smaller than the base.

3. Create styles that are 150%, 200%, 1000% and 80% of the base size.

4. Now that all of my styles are complete you can easily scale the entire layout by changing the base paragraph style by a point or two and redefining the style.

Before changing the base style (100% = 10pt)

After changing the base style (now 100% = 8pt)

There are a few issues that will crop up with this process.

1. Leading can not be scaled. This is probably the biggest issue with this technique, but if your headlines are all 1 line, it will not be a problem.

2. If you have large headline at the top of a text frame, it will extend out.
This can be resolved by going to text frame options > baseline options and increasing the minimum 1st baseline accent.

While this technique may be beneficial to some, I hope that Adobe will allow percentage based styles in more areas such as leading, space before/after, paragraph rules and more. I have my fingers crossed for CS17.

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