Dave's Nested Styles Tutorial

Utilising the ability to nest character styles within paragraph styles

Ok so this tutorial shows how you can set a stylesheet within a stylesheet, it's fantastic for stuff like interviews, or timelines, or anything that involves a character style sheet. I'm assuming you already know about stylesheets, how to create them and what they do. This is a technical tutorial and does not consider design or aesthetics.

I've layed in a few paragraphs of hypothetical copy, with years in front of each, with a tab after them. We will style the copy so that the numbers formatted differently .

1. Select the first paragraph.

Selecting the paragraph

2. Get out the tab pallette (apple+shift+T)

3. Set a left align tab 25mm on the tab pallette by just clicking and then typing in the value.

4. Then in the paragraph styles palette, left indent at 25mm and then first line indent -25mm.

Tabbing

The text block should now look like this:

Text Block

5. Make a paragraph stylesheet of this.

Text Block

6. Once that's done, select the first number and assign it to be bold and red.

7. Make that a character stylesheet.

Making the character style

8. Open your paragraph stylesheet that you made earlier and go to the drop caps and nested styles panel.

9. Click new nested style and select your character style.

Nested styles tab

10. Choose the option 'through' '1' 'Tab Characters'

Nested styles options

11. Press ok, now select the other paragraphs and assign your body copy paragraph style.

So now, whenever you assign the body copy and there is a tab, after the first tab it will assign the character style sheet automatically. This is just one application, you can do heaps with this function.

Assigning styles

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