How to Use Nested Styles in InDesign

[Music] right looks like we are live here on InDesign Tuesday happy InDesign Tuesday everybody or just happy Tuesday today we're going to be taking a look at a user requested topic and it's actually I'll tell you the story is kind of surprising on my end but before we get to that let me answer a quick question it's by a Ken Sonya hopefully I'm saying that right and it's basically he's he basically is asking like to know how to import multiple PDFs into InDesign and make it editable as well well that's you got 50/50 on that one you can import multiple InDesign files just by selecting them when you choose place the editable part is what won't happen because InDesign doesn't edit PDFs now you have two choices you can either if the PDFs aren't secure or the password protect it locked in any way you can open them up in Acrobat and deconstruct them or export them out and then place them that way or you can edit them in Illustrator and take out the pieces you want and place that content but just placing the native PDF files works fine you just want to be able to edit them so now that we got that out of the way so I see a bunch of people coming in the room already summer Stockton Linda Alexandria Umar Jesse Roy welcome as well Marilyn I see you over there Victoria welcome on Facebook and we have some folks chiming in on Twitter or at least joining it on Twitter I haven't seen anyone chime in yet but I saw some people pop in and so thanks for being here under multiple platforms that I stream on today's topic is one that I can't believe that I'm doing nothing I'm not not not that I can't believe I'm doing it can't believe that I hadn't already done it so I saw I think I reached out to me I think it was on one of my Instagram posts and was just kind of random hey could you do a topic on nested styles it was like bad I've done that a million times let me go to my youtube channel find the link and give it to you scrolling through all my videos now keep in mind I've talked about nested Styles many times over the years but usually as part of another topic and while I can even some of the videos I was scrubbing through and oh yeah that's where I talked about nest of styles I kind of did it in passing I really was it wasn't the focus of the video or maybe I was talking about new features and I mentioned it at the time so I can't believe that I hadn't done just a dedicated video just unnecessary and that's why we're doing it today on InDesign Tuesday so get into what nested styles are show you how they work from scratch and I'll use some of the same examples I always use to show you how they can be used to format text but today we're just going to be doing it from scratch to show you how to create them and how they work okay so with that said thanks everyone for joining us a bunch of people coming in even from the Netherlands and want to know about animated zoom in InDesign I'm not sure what animated zoom is but if you could be more descriptive and let me know what you mean maybe I can cover that not today but another day and let's see Hank murtada welcome I'm trying to be better on my pronounce me pronunciations nominal Islam welcome Han Leonel nicole hook john cindy and everyone else if i missed your name sorry about that so let's jump in and let's talk about today's topic let's get into nested style so i'm gonna switch over to the computer as I always do and I've got InDesign open as usual but no document open and I'm gonna tell you where I got the document I'm about to open let's pop over to my browser let's go to stock dodo be calm and I went and downloaded a free template because why not so I did a template and I searched for catalog and that will bring up the catalog templates templates and I just grabbed this first one now I'm not logged in right now so I didn't have to buy it I think this one's free for me but anyway a lot of the templates are free once you're signed in and you can then use them the only reason I wanted to catalog is because the catalog is that is a perfect example of when you would use nested style so let's get into what nested styles are but when I opened up this product catalog up you'll know where I got it from I got it from Adobe stock alright so let's pop over you don't need a stock template you don't need a fancy document you can use a blank document to do nested Styles I just wanted something with some other content already in it I'm going to open up my save I think I saved a version of this one yep there it is I called it mrs. Stiles catalog we zoom out this is what the template is so it's basically for you to create a product catalog put your own pictures input your own text input your own descriptions in and I went in and replace the sample text here with some real text so in other words it's all the sample stuff all on the sides here I replaced each one of this product features with some made-up ones that I just made up right before the stream now the way a nested style works and what's a neces style so a nested style is a paragraph style that includes potentially character styles drop caps those are two things I can think of off the top of my head and potentially other things but those are the main things so if you just wanted to format the whole paragraph of each one of those descriptions that's what a paragraph style to us you just wanted to format individual words randomly that's what a character style does but if you want it to be a consistent thing all the way through the first word gets this style the fifth word gets this style the the words after that get this style that's what a nested style is for so it allows you to quickly format paragraphs of text that have a common format meaning a structure to them that you want to be consistent so a structure could mean I want the first word no matter what to be this thing so everyone's gonna every paragraphs gonna have a first word but then I want from the fourth word on to have this style so or after each : I want this style or after so many characters I want this style there's lots of way or after this word I want this style so you can do it any way you want to have those multiple styles now in order to set it up you need to first create a paragraph style then you have to do it in this order necessarily then create the character styles and then combine them together so I'm a fact let's do the character styles first so I changing it already so the first thing we're gonna do grab the text tool we're going to format the first one so I'm gonna grab the word titanium and I'm gonna go to my character Styles and I'm gonna format titanium to be different and then name it as a style so let's format it to be it's right now a CM pro regular let's see what we have here we have bold so let's make it a CM pearl bold and it's already doing some weird things on this format here I ran into this a little earlier and hang on let me check let me change one thing really quickly here that's it's picking up this red formatting from the kit from the template let's say I want to go in and let's go to our style I just don't want that red formatting let's go to type let's go to paragraph there we go yeah and it's not really getting in that from anything here so let's do it from let's do it from here alright let's redefine the style no I didn't really mean you ready to find the style then to edit the style sorry folks sorry for this this is just a a thing because of this um pretty set to base don't want to do that hang on don't want to do that all right let's say anyway let's go ahead and format it it's just picking up this weird blue highlighting that's driving me crazy all right so let's say that we made it bold we want to and I can't tell where it's getting that highlighting from like it's not it's not underscore it's not you know I forget the template let's just go do this on a blank document then I won't be worried about picking up some extra stuff that someone formatted in this template that I have no idea where they did how they did or where they did it at so let's just do this let's make a blank document that way we won't have to worry about all these extra things so I'm just going to go ahead and paste it without formatting just give me must my raw text and let's go grab each one of these forget the template let's just do it this way all right cool cool one two more copy and these were all the individual frames I'm putting them all in one doesn't really matter okay now I want to worry about some weird formatting from the template okay so next thing I want to do is I want to go in and format the word titanium so we're gonna make the word titanium right now it's in myriad Pro Bowl I think we wanted to use ACM Pro we're gonna use that as a bold and we're going to format it you can make it a color so let's make it a different color let's just simply choose I'm gonna read for now and so now we've defined that first word what we want that first word to look like alright so next thing we would do is now that we got that first word defined you can make it whatever point size font color shading italics whatever you want it to be format that text the way you want it to look then you're going to go to your character style and you're going to create a new character style and you call that new character style whatever you want I'm gonna call mine first word because that's what it is I want my first word to be a CM Pro old red color click OK alright so now what do I want to happen next I want the the let's see 1 2 3 4 assay most of these have at least 4 words [Music] let's say so after the fourth word I want the rest of this to look like this a seeum Pro let's do let's do regular too bad we don't have an italics listen these one we have a thin no let's see bins ok I'm just trying to decide that's what I want it's ok for an example we use then ok and we'll call this one ending text call it whatever you want so I made another character style called ending text then that could be whatever font color shading whatever you wanted to be and then we want this the rest of this to be whatever we want it to be so that right now it defaults into myriad we're gonna also make this a CM Pro and we're just going to make it regular regular type okay so now that's what our paragraph style will be basically if I didn't do any of this if I didn't do any of this extra formatting on the ends it would just be a CM Pro regular so for example if I made all of these or just one of these let's do one let's do one of these as a CM for a regular okay great that would be our paragraph style so I'm gonna go ahead and make a paragraph style called make a new paragraph style we're gonna call this one I'll just call it um it's gonna end up being nested so let's go ahead and make the garden finish it let's make it nest it body ok so now if I don't do anything else it us make sure we turn off any of this other stuff that it might have brought over us we set that to base let's go out and redo it hang on sorry it picked up some other stuff because I didn't paste it in without formatting so let's go ahead and do it again this is gonna be a cm regular 12-point let's make it ten point and that will be our standard body text okay so that's what nested body is gonna be if it didn't have any other formatting so we missed so step one go make your individual character styles for everything you want to format step two make a paragraph style for the rest of the text the way you want the rest of the text that isn't formatted by character Styles the way you want that to look so my character styles are the red bold and light on the end my regular paragraph style is going to be just the ACM Perl regular tin point now step three head over to while you're in that same paragraph style drop go down to drop caps and nested style and here's where you get to put in the formula for how to format the nested style so you're going to do this by clicking fur you can click as many of these as you want so the first one is going to be new nested style what style it's looking for your character styles we only have two so first word through one word so that's easy make first word through however long that or short that first word is great the next style one more is gonna be none meaning don't change a thing leave it a cm purl regular through how many other words characters sentences whatever you want because you could pop this down and change it to whatever you want tab characters however you want this to be so through four words I'm just doing a random thing here so four words will look normal and then one more style that says ending text through let's see we want to do no up - let's do up - instead of through up to one now I don't see a period because a period will be at the end of all my sentences there's no period there I can't choose it from the list but this is a box you can type in - so if it wasn't a period if you're looking for a specific word type the word in if you're looking for a specific thing symbol type the symbol in my case I'm looking for a period just type a period in so now I've got it set up based and it just did it it did read balled regular type then the rest through the period up to the period not through so the period does not get the formatting I wanted the period to get the formatting then I would choose through and the period we get the formatting - so it just changed so now my nested style is ready to go all I have enough to do now is just click OK and I don't ever have to touch the character Styles again unless I want to change them because my nested body will do it all so if I go back to this one and I just anywhere in this paragraph and I click nested body boom it changes it it makes it all the same if I come down here same thing nested body nested body and I can highlight all of these I'm not doing one by one nested body and hanging almost clearly overrides I'm not sure see oh let's get rid of some of this extra formatting that's the problem here there we go same thing here this one has some extra formatting and get rid of those extra theory ok so now that is how a nested style works now the beauty of this is if you go change your mind about anything and updates everything so for example if I get out of this I go back to the character style you say you know what I want that first word to be a different color different size different font different whatever double click on first word change it to whatever you want so instead of it being read less you can mix your own colors but let's say we wanted to make it blue instead so now it's blue and instead of that font it's in Pro Bowl let's choose a different font I don't know what a denture is well let's choose adventure regular click OK and everything not adventure regular don't like that one but anyway he exceeded quickly formatted just the first words of all my nested styles so and maybe maybe you know that that text is okay it's just too small so I'll go back to it go back to that character format have been to regular and changed the size to maybe 14-point click OK and now it's better not much but better alright so you get the idea so just changing those character styles will automatically affect the nested style throughout okay yeah I totally need this in my life that's awesome alright so now let me show you some examples of how you can really take advantage of this this is just setting one up from scratch it just used some random things you know through four words let's say I wanted to change it by the way and make it five words instead of four so go back to nested body I go back to drop caps and nest of styles and on that one that says nothing through four words I changed it to a five make it five words there we go click OK and now the fifth word gets the regular type as well so you can change this anywhere you want now only thing that makes this a little inconsistent is because the the rest of the words is not a set numbers this one's got three this one's got four this one's got more than four so forth and so on so you can if it's all consistent or has a consistent character it can even get fancier so for example let's go in and open a document that has some examples okay so these are nested style examples I've been using for years because they help really illustrate the point so this first one the nested style is for it's for a drop cap so basically all this one does if we look at it it just puts it for master text puts a drop cap in and notice the drop caps a different color different size different font sans-serif versus or it's a serif it did all these things quickly because it's using if I go look at it go look at drop caps it's using a drop cap style called one drop cap if we were to go look at one drop cap in the character styles one drop cap is ever a heavy color blue stroke one point so forth and so on so if I want to change the way all my drop caps looked I could go into character color and change that character color too for example and tone 45 and now all my drop caps are Pantone 45 throughout the entire document okay that's an easy one all that one did was just make a drop cap it's really not a nest of style this next one is super cool but this next one is the kind of consistency I'm talking about in the actual text because what you have is the same things throughout you have four things you have at analog number you have an item name you have a next to it save ripe juicy fresh new you have a description let's call it a description then you have a price so you have four things separated by tabs and they're just using default tabs so that's why some of this stuff is running together if I were to highlight all of this and choose paragraph Styles nested catalog listing which is the style for that it formats everything so it makes the changes the font makes the item name italics it uses a and under a rule below that is big enough to make the text yellow it uses bold and a sinner tab it does all of that formatting quickly and easily and again if we go look at that paragraph style this is what it looks like drop caps are nested style so use the nested the character style call five catalog item number one tab character meaning the catalogue number can be as long or short as it needs to be but soon as you hit tab then it's done then use another character style called fruit through one tab character so each one of these is separated by tabs then use teaser through one exclamation point because the teaser will always end with an exclamation point and then nothing up to the dollar sign and then use price up through the up to the slash and then use units up to the end that's the character style which is the return so that's why I didn't even noticed that the units are not ball bold and they're smaller so they just did it that way okay here's another one this one would be C we did a catalog listing classified ad and this will be a numbered list so a numbered list format the numbers differently to AB and do a wrap so if we look at numbered lists numbered lists drop caps in this two styles is just simply use the character style called for number character through one dot and then format the rest and if we look at the tab section of this here's the wrap that it's using to format so that when the text goes to the inner wraps around it comes back to the same spot as the TAT as the first tab so that way it does not go all the way over to the number so that's just a standard paragraph option and if we were to look at the nested style I'm sorry the character style for okay I guess that would be number character all that one would be is just Helvetica ball 12-point so that's what the number is through one tab okay now this one is the fun one this one is the one that threw me for a loop last time and I'll explain that one for those who saw this that couldn't on the stream I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working there's one piece of it that wasn't working so let's highlight it and let's do paragraph Styles and let's choose this one is the classified ads so there's two paragraphs they're gonna format it's classified ads so this is the one that on sale is different through so many words different standard texts that phone numbers different the web ID is different so if we look at that one that is they use a style called lead-in up to two words so the first two words and every classified ad is going to be the big bold print then the next five words is using next five words that's the style is using so the top quality custom bookcase custom oak bookcases our best prices all year five words and then nothing up to one digit because they assume there won't be a digit until the phone number so again as long as the each one is consistent because can't throw a random number in there it's going to break the nested style for that paragraph and then phone number through ten digits because every phone number is going to be ten digits with the area code and yeah area code numbers ten digits and then if we if we scroll nothing to one web ID and then the web ID so what do you mean what's a web ID where do I choose that in the menu no no it's not an option you choose they typed in the words web ID because there's going to be a web ID in every single one and then you use the web ID style to the end of the paragraph so that's how this one was done now explain what was going on in my last string for some reason the word use was getting italicized and I was like I could not figure out why it's like why is use getting italicized when it has nothing to do with any of this there's no word used the next one should be web ID web ID should be italicized but not the word use and then it finally hit me someone italicized the word use like it wasn't part of the style they just physical highlighted the word used in each paragraph and made an italics so this wasn't overriding it it wasn't it had no reason to it was just leaving it alone because it's nothing up to one web ID and it wasn't overriding the italics that were already placed on it so I just went in and turned off the italics on each word used that had already been put there before I even applied the style so that's why if you watch that stream that's why it wasn't working okay so I fixed that problem that was a problem not in the style but it was someone who literally went in and chose Adobe Garamond italic so Adobe Garamond italic on the word used threw it off because it's like why is that word yeah you get it okay so that's why if you watch that last stream that I did this example and that's why I didn't work okay so each one of these is a style and they set up the style again if you look at these last two at the bottom there's consistency product number product name a whatever they call it a ticker or whatever they leave out the item in yellow the price the unit here two words five words as much text as you want a phone number a web ID so long as you have consistent things in each one then you can use this effectively if it's random text throughout the web enough style probably won't look consistent because it's random text unless you want certain numbers of words to be formatted can you add in no hyphenation to that absolutely so the question was if I were if I didn't want words to be hyphenated I like this one but I don't want worse to be hyphenated in this and I will go to that paragraph style I will go to hyphenation and I would turn off hyphenate and now that style is unhyphenated so you still have every single option that's a part of your normal paragraph styles all you're doing is one section that says I'm gonna add some other stuff and then I'm going to add some character styles in as well so if you don't want hyphenation you want paragraph you want certain tabs you want certain indents and spacing you can do all of that in addition to your drop caps and Nesta sighs okay so and hopefully that answers your question and now that whenever that style will be used it would not hyphenate these paragraphs and I could do the same thing on this one if I need it to so don't hyphenate unless I tell it to okay so that's it that's how to use nested styles when you think Omar for Omar for this topic because this is a dancer saying this is unnecessarily complicated well sorry Nancy I don't know how to make it any simpler than three steps create character style create a paragraph style nest in your character style that's it not complicated it may take up these few things to do depending on how format you want but now imagine since you said it was complicated let's say I had a thousand pages of these items I highlight a thousand pages worth of items click one button and they all be formatted just that easily I say that's worth a few minutes of set-up time up front okay with that said thanks for watching and we will catch you on the next one Paul's asking can you play with no background I don't know what you mean with no background all right cheers everybody thanks for watching and we will catch you on the next one bye everybody [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Terry White

Views: 15,449

Keywords: Terry White, InDesign, InDesign Tutorial, How-To, Creative Cloud, Adobe, Nested Styles, Style Sheets, Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, Page Layout, Text Formatting

Id: pZpI64eCW9s

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019