InDesign 101: Character Styles

How much do you know about using character styles—the “little sister” to paragraph styles? The more you know, the faster you will work. I confess that I don’t often spend as much time as I should teaching character styles. There’s so much that I want my students to learn about paragraph styles that I sometimes gloss over the intricacies of character styles. So consider this my apology and makeup lesson. 

What are styles?

First, let’s take a quick refresher on what styles are and why you want to use them… religiously! Styles are simply sets of instructions that allow you to format text, tables, and objects consistently throughout a document—or many documents. For instance, a paragraph style defines a range of text formatting. Similarly, InDesign has object styles that can be used to capture and apply the fill, stroke, corner effects, and much more to objects. Cell styles are the instructions for formatting table cells, and table styles are the instructions for formatting all the parts of a table. InDesign has specific panels for all of its style controls. They are located under Window > Styles (Figure 1).

There are two types of styles that govern text: paragraph styles and character styles. Before you can understand the differences between them, you need to understand the differences between character and paragraph formatting.

Paragraphs vs. Characters

When you format text, you’re actually applying two different types of controls: paragraph and character attributes. Paragraph attributes always apply to an entire paragraph—such as the alignment of a paragraph (left, centered, or justified). If you want one line centered and another left-aligned, you need to divide those lines

into two different paragraphs. However, formatting such as text size or color are character attributes, because you can apply them at the character level—for example, you can have black text next to red text within the same paragraph.  InDesign’s Control panel is divided into separate areas for character and paragraph formatting. When the Character Formatting Controls button (“A”) is selected on the far left side of the panel, InDesign displays the character attributes on the left side of the panel and paragraph attributes on the right (Figure 2). Click the Paragraph Formatting Controls button (“¶”), and the two sets of attributes switch places.

But here’s what confuses some InDesign students: paragraph styles apply both paragraph and character formatting, while character styles apply only character attributes. So how do you know which one to use?

When To Use Which

When you define a paragraph style, you’re defining everything about the appearance of text in a paragraph. Since characters are contained in paragraphs, you have to define the character attributes as part of the paragraph style (Figure 3). You should use a paragraph style when you want to change the formatting for all, or virtually all, of the text in a paragraph.

Character styles, on the other hand, should almost never be used for all the text in a paragraph. If you apply a character style to a whole paragraph, you’re probably doing it wrong. Think of character styles as the little bits of formatting for just a few characters in the text. Use them when you need to make an exception to the rule you defined in the paragraph style. The most common use of character styles is to apply italic or bold formatting to text. Look at the words italic and bold in the previous sentence. They are perfect examples of how to use character styles. They are little bits of styling sprinkled within the text (Figure 4 and Figure 5).  And here’s the important thing to remember: Where a paragraph style always affects all the character and paragraph formatting of a paragraph (font, alignment, and more), InDesign’s character styles affect only specific formatting. For example, you could make a character style that changes just the font, or just the size and the color—and leaves the other paragraph and character formatting as it was.

Creating a character style

My favorite way to create a character style is to start with a paragraph style applied to text. Then, I select some text within the paragraph and style it with the local formatting that I want for the character style. Most times it’s something like italic or bold. When I apply this local formatting, a plus sign (+) appears next to the paragraph style name. This indicates that manual character formatting—not a character style—has been applied (Figure 6). 

With my text still selected, I choose New Character Style from the Character Styles panel menu. This opens the New Character Style dialog box (Figure 7). Every formatting change I manually applied to the text now becomes attributes of the new character style. I just name the style, select the Apply Style to Selection checkbox, and click OK. The character style appears in the Character Styles panel, applied to the text. And I now have a character style I can apply anywhere else in the document.  It’s a good idea to keep your character style definitions as simple as possible. Define only those attributes that differ from the paragraph style attributes. When I just want a style that applies italics to text, I don’t include font name, point size, color, leading, or any other attribute in the character style definition (Figure 8). The only attribute is the italic font style. Using the minimum character attributes in a character style definition gives me much more flexibility when working with character styles. For instance, I can use the same character style, with just the italic definition, to style 10-point body text as well as 24-point headlines, because the only thing that is being applied is the italic style. This flexibility also lets me redefine paragraph styles without worrying that any unwelcome changes in my text formatting will occur. For example, let’s say I have a paragraph style that specifies Myriad Pro, and also a character style of italic. I apply the paragraph style to the whole paragraph and the italic character style to one word. Now, if I wanted to change the typeface of the paragraph style to Minion Pro, the character style still works—it still applies the italic attribute. This is a terrific help to quickly change one font to another without having to redefine the character style. Unfortunately, you do have to watch out for the character styles “going pink,” as discussed in the next section.

When character-styled text goes pink

You may be familiar with the “dreaded pink text.” It can happen when you open a document from someone who used fonts you don’t have. All the text is highlighted in a non-printing, pink color that means the specified font is not available, and InDesign is currently using a substitute font. (It can also indicate that a particular character is not available in the currently selected font.) The fix is to get that font or apply another font to the text. There’s also another way to see the dreaded pink text, and it has to do with applying character styles. Let’s say your paragraph style uses Futura Book for the main text. There is no italic version of this font. Rather, there is a version called Book Oblique. So the character style for italicized content would need to specify Book Oblique in the Font Style field. But what happens if you apply that character style to text, and then change the paragraph style from Futura Book to, say, Arial Regular. The Arial family uses the name “Italic,” not “Oblique,” so when InDesign tries to apply the “oblique” character style to Arial, the text becomes pink, indicating the font is missing or unavailable (Figure 9)—that is, InDesign is trying to find an “Arial Oblique,” which doesn’t exist.

The same thing happens if there is any variation in the style name. I’ve had to redefine character styles when one font uses “SemiBold,” another uses “Semibold,” and still another uses “Semi Bold.” This reliance on the exact name for character styles drives InDesign users crazy. You have to redefine the character style simply because the font designer used a slightly different style name than is used in other fonts. Maybe someday we’ll be able to specify alternate styles in InDesign. In my dreams, a character style would be smart enough to first look for an italic, and if that wasn’t available, then it would look for oblique, or slanted, or Book Oblique, and so on. This is similar to what happens on the web with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Redefining a character style

Changing the definition of a character style is easy. Right-click the name of the style in the Character Styles panel, choose Edit, and make your changes in the Character Style Options dialog box.  Or, if you want to skip the dialog box, just select some text with the character style applied to it, and change it. Because there is now “local formatting” on the text, you’ll see a plus sign (+) next to the character style name in the panel. Choose Redefine Style from the Character Styles panel menu, and the updated style definition changes throughout the document.

Applying character styles

You don’t have to use the Character Styles panel to create or apply character styles. There are plenty of places in the program where you can apply a character style as part of paragraph style formatting. A list can have a character style automatically applied to the bullet or number. Character styles can be applied to page numbers and dotted leaders in a table of contents. You can specify a character style to be applied automatically when you create hyperlinks. Also, drop caps, nested styles, line styles, GREP styles, and cross-references all let you apply character styles automatically to text. And, since CS4, InDesign has offered the ability to create a new character style while you’re using paragraph style options like nested styles, GREP styles, bullets, and numbering. In the Character Style menu, just scroll down past all the existing styles, and choose New Character Style (Figure 10).

Hidden character styles

You might be confused one day when you click on some text that looks like it must be formatted with a character style, but nothing is selected in the Character Styles panel. What has happened is the paragraph style includes a nested style, line style, or GREP style. A character style is applied, but since it’s applied automatically via a paragraph style, it’s listed only at the bottom of the Character Styles panel, preceded by a paragraph symbol: ¶ (Figure 11).

Unfortunately, the listing doesn’t tell you if it’s a nested style, line style, or GREP style. But at least you have your first clue as to the source of this “hidden” character style. “Aha!” you say. “But what if there are conflicting character styles applied to the same text? What if you have a GREP style that makes text green, but a manually applied character style that makes text red? Or an italic line style and a bold nested style? Which style wins?” Fortunately, better minds than I have already thought of these questions and answered them in detail. Mike Rankin wrote a great blog post about that here and Tim Cole wrote one here.

But wait… There’s more!

Fortunately, I don’t have to write up every tip and trick about working with character styles. The topic is so deep that there have been many terrific posts on InDesignSecrets.com. For example: Basing one style on another. Just as with paragraph styles, you can base one character style on another. This makes it possible to use one character style as a “master style” for several others. I wrote up a blog post last year that shows how to use this technique to turn underline options on or off for several other character styles. Basing a Paragraph Style on a Character Style. One day you might want to create a paragraph style with all the attributes of a character that you’ve used. Unfortunately, there’s no “official” way to do that. Fortunately, David Blatner knows an unofficial way. Applying [None] with a keystroke. I often find that I pick up a character style when I start typing after inserting a character style into text. This often happens when the text is at the end of a sentence and I don’t want a question mark to be italicized. What I want is to get back to [None], meaning no character style, with a single keystroke. While I know I can do it with Quick Apply, I want to apply a keystroke like I can for any other paragraph or character style. But the [None] style in the Character Styles panel has a slashed pencil next to it. That pencil indicates the style is locked and there’s no way to edit it to apply a keystroke. Never one to let “no way” get in her way, Anne-Marie Concepción wrote up some techniques to get around that limitation. Character styles for everything? Arrrgh! Some people are downright bizarre when it comes to how they use character styles. Anne-Marie Concepción describes some documents she has seen that have only one paragraph style, and character styles formatting everything. Here’s the post where she described how to fix that nightmare. And about 1,000 things more! There’s no way I can cover everything about character styles. If you want to learn more, just do a search here at CreativePro and you’ll find over a thousand results. No matter what your questions about character styles are, you’re sure to find an answer in that list.