Book designers are always jumping in and out of multiple Adobe programs to pull a book together. We turn to Photoshop for retouching images and Illustrator for building graphics, but our most used program is InDesign, the backbone of editorial design.

Indesign sets itself apart with its text styles functionality. Paragraph and character styles make working with 30- or 40-thousand-word manuscripts seamless and organised.

A 101 in text styles

In InDesign, styles are used to apply formatting to paragraphs, characters and objects. Let’s have a look at the ‘body text’ paragraph style from a book we did for East Coast Beverages.

Here you can see the Basic Character Formats applied. If you look down the left panel, there are many other settings we can apply, from colour to alignment to shading. Once we are happy with the settings, we save it, and now any body of text that has this style applied will always maintain these settings.

This ensures consistency across the document and makes formatting text as easy as assigning a style rather than manually applying each setting to every paragraph. It also means that if down the track we need to make a change to the body text, we can simply update the style settings and all text will update itself. Magic!

We repeat this process for every style needed throughout the book. The styles are determined by scanning the manuscript to see what types of headings and breakouts will pop up throughout the book.

Delving deeper

InDesign styles can be complex and carry all kinds of formatting. To make things trickier, you can also ‘nest’ character styles inside paragraph styles. Nesting means setting rules so a character style – like bold or italics – is automatically applied to part of the paragraph. A character style affects individual letters or words, not the whole paragraph. This is handy when you want to highlight certain words without messing up the paragraph’s overall formatting. Nesting lets you automate that step.

For example, let’s look at this ‘Caption’ paragraph style.

Under Drop Caps and Nested Styles, we can see a nested character style called ‘Caption start’, which simply applies bold to the characters. We want this to appear at the start of captions – for the direction words only – so we nest the style through to the first en space in the paragraph. This means any text before the en space will follow the character style, and anything after will follow the paragraph style. It might sound complicated, but nesting can save hours of manual work across a book.

Styles are also very useful for text variables. Things like running headers and the table of contents are based on selected styles. Once text is correctly styled, InDesign does most of the work for us, scanning the document to fill out the variables.

Similar to text styles, InDesign offers objects styles too. Instead of going in and applying the same drop shadow settings to each image, an object style can hold all your settings in one place, applied by one simple click.

Style is the answer

Styling in InDesign saves us many hours of manual work, but most importantly ensures consistency and accuracy throughout a book. There will always be times when we need to apply overrides to fix some bad kerning, or clean up paragraph rag, but ultimately it is the answer to all things editorial design.

– Jane Heriot, junior designer