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• • November 18, 2009 at 12:01 am #53766
    Vincent2

    Member

    Hi everyone.

    This may seem like a simple question, but it would be great to hear other people's method. I am sure it is my way of working because I use too many paragraph styles, particularly if nested styles are involved.

    As an example, I have a paragraph style named 'body' that I want to use throughout a large book publication. This is the main body style for the entire book. The first paragraph uses the 'body' style, the second paragraph is the same except it has the 5th word bolded so I make a new paragraph style named 'body bold 1' that has a nested style. The third paragraph now needs to have the 8th and 9th word bolded, so I create a new paragraph style named 'body bold 2' that also uses a nested style. And it keeps going on like this!

    This also applies to different coloured text. Another example would be my 'body' style that needs a white colour. So I create a new paragraph style based on the 'body' and call it 'body white'.

    My paragraph style keeps on building, and it gets confusing looking for a style, even if I am using folders to categorise it.

    It would also be great to get tips on naming styles. I named the 'body bold 1' and 'body bold 2' styles this way because they are short and simple, but it is also vague in it's description.

    Any help would be greatly appreicated. Thanks.

  • November 18, 2009 at 12:54 am #53767
    Adam Jury

    Member

    In general, I try (but don't always succeed) to avoid naming paragraph and character styles with a description of what they look like, and instead go for a description of their function. That way, if you end up changing the formatting, you don't also have to go through and rename the styles. I think this is easier to explain to someone else, too — “Use the 'Example' style” as opposed to “use the 'Green text in Gill Sans' style.”

    There are a few abbreviations that I commonly use: NI for No Indent, BUC for Bold Until Colon, SB for Sidebar. I use those as suffixes, so 'body text' could become 'body text NI' or 'body text NI BUC' — those break my 'describe the function' rule, but I think 'body text with tertiary header' is even more unwieldy. ;-)

  • November 18, 2009 at 1:07 am #53769
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I’m the kind of person who has tons of paragraph style sheets as well. In fact, I’m working on a book now where I’ve got about a hundred of them.

    I use “TX” for regular text. TXF for text flush.

    Other examples are how I name my paragraph style sheets: I use “BLA,” BLM,” and “BLZ.” BLA is the first bulleted entry, BLM are the middles, and BLZ is the last. I use A, M, Z, because A is the first in the alphabet, M just happens to be in the middle (and starts with the letter “M”, and Z is last. I do the same thing with numbered lists (NLA, NLM, NLZ). The A and Z’s have the space above and below. And I use “BL” for bulleted list” in my mind and “NL” for “numbered list. It's just shortcuts.

    For a situation such as yours, I would probably use TX plus the number of the nesting.

    TX1 = body text with one words nested
    TX2 -= body text with one words nested
    TX9 = body text with nine words nested

    Text white? I’d use TXW.

    And I do the same thing with tables. “T2” for 2-column, “T3” for three-column, etc.

    I keep my style sheets as short as simple as possible, but it’s also streamlined at the company I work for. And since we have most of our manuscript keyboarded, the shorter the better.

    That's how I do things. I'm sure there will be a lot of different opinions on style sheet names.

    doc

  • November 18, 2009 at 8:24 am #53773
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    A little aside to this subject but not entirely off-topic. When making a nested style I add a tilde ~ to the style name to show at a glance it contains a nested element.

  • November 18, 2009 at 11:02 am #53779
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I just go

    Heading L1

    Heading L2

    Heading L3

    Heading L4

    Heading L5

    etc.

    Body Level 1

    Body Level 2

    Body Level 3

    etc.

    Bullets Level 1

    Bullets Level 2

    Bullets Level 3

    etc.

    Headings are based on Body Level 1

    Body is based on Body Level 1

    Bullet Level 1 is based on Body Level 1

    Bullet Level 2 is based on Bullet 1

    Then whatever else I need follows the same format.

    I acutally have predefiined styles before I open a document genreated, and I made a .inx file of those styles (for when pesky preferences reset grrr. )

    I have all my swatches preloaded, and incorporated into styles (they are in Spot Colour but the ink manager is preprogrammed to convert to CMYK).

    To change a publication Style I just need to edit the Heading Level 1 and Body Level 1, remove swatch and replace it with another.

    Of course helps to have text frames already set up in Object styles, you can adjust the columns and widths quite easily when you use an Object Style for text frames.

    Making a new publication is a snap. Looks different, feels different, it is different, but just a few tweaky bits with styles.

    (I should add that when nested styles are generated I make sure I make a character style that says “Bold Italic nested with Heading 1 Level ~” then on Heading Level 1 I would duplicate this style (so it's based on Heading Level 1 and add a “~” to the name of the style. Then I add the nested style.”

    I don't do shortnames for styles, because others have to work on my files, so it would be unfair to them to have them guess what BUC or something is, and I have to think about what way I leave the files for when I'm no longer working here (I will be here, but not forever :) ) )

  • November 18, 2009 at 7:48 pm #53804
    jools

    Member

    The first paragraph uses the 'body' style, the second paragraph is the same except it has the 5th word bolded so I make a new paragraph style named 'body bold 1' that has a nested style. The third paragraph now needs to have the 8th and 9th word bolded, so I create a new paragraph style named 'body bold 2' that also uses a nested style. And it keeps going on like this!

    Just curious: are these for paragraphs that come up again and again, e.g. you have lots of paragraphs with the 5th word bold, and lots of other paragraphs with exactly the 8th and 9th word bold? If not and you just want to embolden arbitrary words in a paragraph, you can use just one paragraph style 'body' and then just set the words that require it to bold manually, or if you're worried about clearing those manual overrides inadvertently, make a character style called “bold” and use the character style for those individual words. Apologies if this is way too obvious…

  • November 18, 2009 at 8:04 pm #53806
    Adam Jury

    Member

    hank_scorpio said:

    Post edited 4:09 am – November 18, 2009 by hank_scorpio
    

    ---

    I don't do shortnames for styles, because others have to work on my files, so it would be unfair to them to have them guess what BUC or something is, and I have to think about what way I leave the files for when I'm no longer working here (I will be here, but not forever ) )

    ---

    Ah yes, one of my roles at the company I'm at is to maintain the training documents for our freelancers… so all that stuff is documented. :-)

    Freelancer quote that made me bang my head on my desk: “Oh, you and all your styles!” — said after I explained to them that to achieve a certain visual effect, I wanted them to format a paragraph with a paragraph style, and some words within it as character style. I spent more time fixing that book than it would have taken me to build it myself.

  • November 19, 2009 at 12:02 am #53811
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I guess I'm lucky with abbreviated style sheet names. With the book publishers we work with, it's pretty standard. For example, many of the book publishers use:

    CN – chapter number

    CT – chapter title

    PN – part number

    PT – part title

    FMH – frontmatter head

    HT – half title

    TX -text

    TXF – text flush

    EXT – extract

    etc. etc.

    To me it's great, and since I have to mark up the manuscript (and write the stylesheets), it's much easier to write “TX” in front of the paragraph than to write “body paragraph” or “body level” or something. And luckily this naming convention has been in place for years.

    As an aside–we still mark up manuscript with quark tagging as we use XTags for Quark and ID.

    doc

  • November 19, 2009 at 12:32 am #53815
    Vincent2

    Member

    Thanks for the help guys, all your suggestions have been very helpful.

    If you manually apply character styles with only a 'bold' and apply it to a paragraph style, it doesn't override the paragraph style. I knew there was a simpler way of doing it because I always thought paragraph styles would override the character styles. I have tested it out and it works like a charm!

    The advantage of naming the styles in abbreviated form such as 'TX' or 'TXW' is that it is easily seen and simple to remember. But I can also see the problem because only the person who made the document know what they represent. Labelling them as levels may be the option to use to overcome this.

  • November 19, 2009 at 12:51 am #53817
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Good luck with your naming style, Vincent.

    And I want to add-we work with some publishers whose naming convention is even more abbreviated than what myself and others use. P for “paragraph,” or pl for “paragraph flush,” etc. It's for their XML tagging for when they archive the files or something. Now–names like that totally confuse me.

    And, while I know my abbreviated style is not popular (though it's used by a lot of publishers), H1 for a level 1 head is easier to mark-up and remember, and to me makes sense. H2 for a level 2 head, etc.

    But like I said–everyone has their own naming conventions and ways of doing things. And it depends on your work flow and clients.

    doc

  • April 13, 2010 at 9:09 am #55501
    isteiner

    Member

    docbud said:

    And, while I know my abbreviated style is not popular (though it's used by a lot of publishers), H1 for a level 1 head is easier to mark-up and remember, and to me makes sense. H2 for a level 2 head, etc.

    ---

    If wish I had found this thread sooner…

    (Had posted some of my thoughts on the thread Organizing Styles before finishing the catalog I'm working on.)

    I was working on my first real publishing project as a product catalog over the last several months and I had built a book with half a dozen documents for the content, cover, etc. I had an entire monitor dedicated to Table Styles, Cell Styles, Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, and Object Styles…

    Found myself in an interesting predicament a few times when trying to sync folders (posted my conclusion in response to erickp), and created a system in which to identify inherited styles (see my original post), but now that we're looking at working with a developer to pull out the data for a website, I'm admiring docbud's syle style!

    @docbud: any advice on naming styles for exporting into XML, etc?

  • April 13, 2010 at 3:06 pm #55505
    John.Clifford

    Member

    For years I was involved with textbook publishing, even during the days when Quark had a 120 limit on stylesheets. We always had to have 3 different style sheets for our lists. A numbered list might have sheets:

    NL_enter

    NL_revolve

    NL_exit

    that way you could include the space above and blow the lists as the enter and exit with revolve not throwing any extra space. Of course, when we reached our limit for stylesheets, we had to be very creative indeed.

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