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We believe that all InDesign training courses should incorporate the correct use of styles to enhance workflow and maintain consistency within a document and across a range of documents. Most delegates on our InDesign training courses know what styles are: a series of named formats which can be applied to your text so you don't have to manually apply formatting attributes one by one. Even new InDesign users are probably familiar with the use of styles in Microsoft Word: "Heading 1", "Heading2", "Normal", etc. However, InDesign's implementation of styles is much more sophisticated and, when we run InDesign training courses in London, we always emphasise their importance. The obvious benefits of using styles are, firstly, consistency: the same formats are applied each time without variations accidentally creeping in. Secondly, speed: if a heading needs six formatting attributes applied then, if you do not use a style, you will have to apply each attribute manually. If you use a style, you can apply the necessary formats with one click or one keystroke. A third benefit is the ability to update and modify the look of your text simply by modifying the definition of your style(s). One less salient benefit of using styles in InDesign is document scalability. Styles play a key role in some of InDesign's advanced features and documents with no styles cannot benefit from these features. For example, a key part of creating layouts driven by XML is the mapping of XML tags to the styles within a document. A second example is encountered when creating tables of contents. InDesign generates tables of contents based on the use of styles. In setting up the table of contents, one specifies which styles are to be tracked. When the table of contents is actually created, InDesign finds each bit of text in the defined style or styles and, if required, places the appropriate page number next to it. In actual fact, the table of contents feature is more powerful than the name suggests since it can be used to generate a list of anything within a document as long as a particular style has been used consistently throughout. For example, if every photo in a document has a caption formatted with a particular style, the table of contents facility can be used to produce a "list of photographs". A third example of advanced applications of styles is when working with InDesign books; a features which enables several InDesign documents to be treated as one entity for such operations as preflighting, creating PDFs and the generation of tables of contents. Separate users can work on each document within the book but the styles used within all documents can be streamlined by a process known as synchronisation. Because of its importance, we cover styles both on our basic InDesign training courses and on or advanced InDesign training as well. On our advanced courses, we explain the use of such features as nested styles whereby a character style can be included within a paragraph style and automatically applied to certain characters within the paragraph; for example, all characters up to the first occurrence of a colon or an em dash.
By: Andrew Whiteman
The author is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe InDesign training courses in London and throughout the UK.
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