Cascading Style Sheets

Character Style Sheets can be real time savers for designers especially in the creation of long or multi-page documents. Character Style Sheets are simply a recorded format that you can then use in your design at will. Consistency is one of the principles that designers must follow. Character Sheets help the designer so he/she doesn’t have to manually apply the same type formatting over and over again throughout the document.

Create a New Character Style

Once you have opened your InDesign document, make sure that your Character Style Sheets palette is open. If it isn’t. go to Window > Type > Character

Now that your palette is open click the “New Character Style” button.

You should get a new Character Style that InDesign calls “Character Style 1” by default. Double click on it. You should get a new window called Character Style Options.

Set the Character Style Options

Now you can change the name of your style sheet and set your type anyway you want. You can also select a font family, font size, leading, kerning, etc. Tracking is the general space between letters, while kerning is the space between letter sets. I generally set the kerning to optical as InDesign will automatically adjust the kerning where needed.

Change the Character Style Options for Quick Changes Throughout

Select the text that you want to apply your Character Style to and then simply click on your new Charcter Style. Just as an informative note, should you change the formatting on any parts of text where you applied a Character Style, you will see a (+) added to the name of the style when you click on that text.

If you want all of the parts of texts where you have applied the Character Style to change in one go, all you have to do is to double click on the Character Style you want to change and then change your options there.

Loading Character Styles from another Document

To load Character Stlyes from another document, click on the small arrow in the Character Styles Panel and Select Load Character Styles. Browse to the document you want to load the styles from and select it. Check the boxes for each style to load.

Click on the new CSS button.

Set your CSS options.