I just need to make something really clear:
Don’t apply a character style to a whole paragraph!
That means if your document has character styles with the same names as your paragraph styles, you’re definitely doing it wrong. If you have more character styles than paragraph styles, you’re probably doing it wrong:
In the image above, every piece of text has both a paragraph style and a character style applied to it. That is bad. Really bad. Please do yourself and everyone you work with a huge favor and stop doing this.
Character styles, in InDesign, should only be applied to a character, or a word, or perhaps a sentence or two. As soon as you find yourself applying it to a whole paragraph, you should think to yourself: “Wait, I think I’m supposed to be using paragraph styles here.”
Caveats
There are, of course, a few exceptions. For example, I sometimes make a single paragraph style for a heading, and I’ll set it to a Black color swatch. But then I’ll need to change the color of one of the headings in the text to red or some other color. So I’ll make a “red” character style and apply it to that whole heading.
Now, if I had to make a bunch of headings red then I would not use a character style! I’d make a paragraph style (probably based on the original black heading paragraph style) colored red. But if it’s just one or two in the document, well, a character style probably isn’t so terrible.
Solutions
If you have been using character styles incorrectly (or someone sent you a document that uses them wrongly) follow Anne-Marie’s advice here on how to get rid of the character styles.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on May 4, 2016
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