Senior Field Engineer

As Senior Field Engineer at DPCI, Rob Underwood is responsible for a wide range of services including training, technical support, and systems integration.

The co-author of six Adobe training books, Underwood is an Adobe Certified Print Specialist, an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Photoshop, and Acrobat, and Certified Technical Training (CTT). In addition to articles on the Creative Suite, Rob also writes on K4 Editorial System.

Blogs

Recent Webinars

> Integrating K4 and Drupal to Support Multi-channel Workflows

White Papers

> Innovations in Digital Asset Management, Circa 2008

> The Challenges with ECM With or Without a Down Economy

> DPCI Seminar: Impediments to XML Workflow

July 27, 2009

Using the New Grep and Nested Line Styles Feature’s Inside InDesign CS4 — Part 1

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Using Paragraph Styles and Character Styles for type is hardly a new invention. However, InDesign continues to take styling to a new level in CS4 with the brand new Grep and Nested Line Styles features. This two-part blog will explain both of these new Paragraph Style features, as well as some older style features you may not have known about.

I'm a firm believer in the use of styles. If all text was styled in any given publication, we could live in a utopia of re-purposed content. But, before I go into my usual "Style" rant, I'd like to answer a simple question, "Why use styles?" Simply put, if you have a title, headline or any recurring text in a publication, and you find yourself trying to remember the weight, color, tracking, space before, etc... just so you can apply those attributes again, then you're working too hard. You should be stylizing your type to make your workflow more efficient.

Secondly, if everything has a style applied, it makes universal changes simple and efficient. Do you think the email addresses under the writer's names should be a different color? If you've applied a style to each instance, you can simply change the style and watch them all update.

Lastly, the number one reason you should use styles is because you can find any attribute you can apply to type in the Paragraph Style panel. If you're new to InDesign, and you can't remember where certain type attributes are located, make a style, and watch the type update as you define it in the New Paragraph Styles dialog box. Just make sure you have Preview checked!

Building a Nested Line Style Into a Paragraph Style

Styles

A type sample from a clothing catalog.

The example below features type that has already been thoroughly styled on the left, and type that has yet to be styled on the right. A traditional approach to stylizing text like this would be to make a paragraph style for each section; the item, description, price and last line. Then you could either apply the superscript to the "99" and the "$" manually, or make a Character Style to apply the superscript. Styles would quicken this time consuming process. The biggest challenge would be the first line of the description. Notice how only the first line is slightly taller, blue and small caps. This would have to be applied and adjusted by hand. I believe the programmers at Adobe have heard the cry to automate tedious production work, and have developed ways to make applying styles easier. By the end of this two-part blog you will know how to get the unstyled type on the right look like the styled type on the left in one click!

Styles

The style before and after a one-click apply.

I started by first selecting the already styled "Item Name" with the text tool, then from the Paragraph Styles panel menu I chose New Paragraph style. I also checked "Apply Style to Selection." This was a new feature in CS3. It allowed a user who is defining a new style to apply that style right inside the New Paragraph Style dialog window. In previous versions of InDesign, making a style did not apply it to the selected text. Since you have the option to "Apply Style to Selection," you can make and apply Styles all at once!

Checking Apply Style to Selection in the Paragraph panel.

I then made a Paragraph Style for the Description. I was careful to not select the first line I had made blue and small caps. Instead, I selected what the rest of the paragraph looked like. You can use Nested Line Styles later on to stylize the first line. I then made a style called Price, where I only highlighted a number and not a superscripted dollar sign or number. Finally, I made a paragraph style called Last Line; I highlighted the last line to which I had already applied a dotted Rule Below.

As I've mentioned before, using Styles by themselves is huge time saver. However, Nested Line Styles can automate styling even further. Nested Line Styles let you nest Character Styles inside a Paragraph Style. This means that you can apply a specific Character Style to a determined line of text. Should you need to adjust the size of the frame, and the line of text grows, the nested Character style will automatically update the text for however many lines you have specified. This is exactly what I needed to apply to the first line of the description.

To build a Nested Line Style inside of the "Description" Paragraph Style, I selected some of the Description inside the text frame that had not been styled yet. I applied the Description style and then double-clicked the style inside the Paragraph Styles panel to edit it. I then selected Drop Caps and Nested Styles from the Menu on the left. You can now see the new feature of Nested Line Styles at the bottom of the dialog box. For those of you who have made Nested Styles before, you may be saying, "Hold on, you haven't made any Character Styles to apply yet!" You are right that I haven't made the Character Styles I need to apply. However another new feature of CS4 is the ability to make Character Styles while you're in the Nested Style dialog box! You can click on "New Line Style," from the drop down menu that indicates "None," and you can choose "New Character Style."

Styles

In CS4 you can define new Character Styles as you make Nested, Nested Line, and Grep Styles.

It is here that I named the style "Blue, Small Caps, 12pts." I then proceeded to choose that character style for the new Line Style. Now the first line of text gets that Character Style applied to it! As I adjust the size of the box, I can see the first line of type automatically adjust.

Make sure to check out my next blog on Grep Styles, where I use Next Stlyles and Object Styles to apply all this formatting in one click!

Styles